Ryvah by Count Uvula

Introduction

posted by Count Uvula Original SA post

So I was directed to this thread after posting about two degrees of separation away from the guy who made this anime pedophile game (and book and card game and HTML browser game):

Ryvah (is Freedom)

What kind of freedom is Ryvah? Judging by the philosophy section, it's the kind of freedom. The game is pretty much a venue for pretty much all of this guy's fetishes, like 2 inch tall young girls, 2 feet tall young girls, and 7 feet tall young girls.

Unfortunately, the core rulebooks do not appear to be on the website, even though the tabletop RPG section says they're 'available online'. Maybe they're in the store listed on the home page's site map-- The plain text site-map, as in, contains no links.

What I do know is that each race has a unique combat bonus for being female and nude, and there's some info to be gleamed from the abysmal sample character sheets:



Haha I fucking lied it's a confusing mess, and each class has a completely different character sheet that doesn't actually say what class it is on it.
We can see that Agonda the Dwarf is not very comely, with a comeliness of 6. This is to be expected because he's not a prepubescent girl. He's also frail and in spite of having almost every form on his character sheet filled out he's got an HP of 8, when the base damage of his weapon is 2d10. On the armor class side... What the fuck is S.B.L. and why is he using two near-naked women to up his armor class!? Seriously, it goes leather armor, 2 girls, dex bonus.



Next up is Blaze, the fire wizard . She is child/adolescent at 190 years old. Fairies grow at a slow rate, but I'm sure she's got the emotional maturity her worldy experience would endow her with. She is HIGHLY comely, she gets a +4 racial bonus to it. The only other character to near that comeliness, well, I can't post her sheet here because she's naked and only 190.

Things start to devolve in to more nonsense without the rule books to reference. She has speech casting, in the form of 'Arm Body Speech', and its type is 500. Her skills include the devastating spell Purple along with Fire Attack and My Book Fire Attack . She also has 40 flaming minotaur bloods. Whenever someone would bring up material components for spells during D&D I would throw a tantrum, but then they wanted shit like chalk, not something badass like the perpetually burning blood of minotaurs that I could weaponize just by pouring on things.



Carnage is a wizard, like Blaze. I'm not sure why she is named Carnage. Her character sheet is also completely fucking different from Blaze's. I was assuming they were class dependent but that is apparently wrong as the alt-text for both is wizard. One of the characters also has Angel Guardian as their class while another fighter has Angel Guardian as their race

Back to Carnage: First off, she's 15 and Human. Being 15, she's... Adolescent/Adult? A 15 year old girl is one of 3 female characters to have 'adult' as an age descriptor , with another of them being a 15 year old Harpy/Human half-bread. She's not very comely, I guess because she's already peaked in comeliness a few years ago and is slowly withering now. There's also a nice chart of how many mushrooms she needs to cast unnamed magics, not very interesting.



The only thing more worse than the gallery randomly placed in the tabletop RPG section, is the images that appear when you hover over schools of magic in the 'Guilds' section.
Here's some fine examples:
http://i.imgur.com/dnO5L.png - The glorious art of Divination
http://i.imgur.com/FHE2Y.png Necromancy, which is apparently about tigerwoman tits
http://i.imgur.com/topmV.png White magic, truth, honesty, purity
Yellow magic is an 8 year old with tits holding up some lobsters What kind of magic is it? THAT OF COWARDS, OF COURSE.


I'll ask my friends if they can get the guy to email me a pdf copy of the rulebooks, and then follow that up with 'Why would you ever talk to this man after it became clear he was a complete creeper?'

Be act and feel unique and different from eachother.

posted by Count Uvula Original SA post

I don't play a great deal of pen and paper RPGs. The main basis of comparison I have is D&D 3.5. Feel free to point out anything stupid I say while exploring the depths of Ryvah. This introductory post will also be on the short side, I don't have time to go in to specific content yet.

Ryvah
Part 1: Be act and feel unique and different from eachother.
I could only get an old version of the Ryvah rulebooks, but they're in physical, professionally bound form. The copyright is April 25th, 2008 on both books. "This version has like 90% less tits, I'm sorry," Mary says as I begin to thumb through the monster manual. I am grateful for the gift, even if I wish they had more skeezy anime women; I assume Mike only gets one copy of each edition printed, and he's using the newest one himself.

The book is a poorly formatted mess, the names of creatures are often on the page preceding their information/bad pencil drawing. Apparently, using random inappropriate anime pictures for everything is a more recent development, and all the drawings by the author look like a 16 year old boys attempt to replicate the drawings in a D&D booklet. The front covers are pretty unassuming, basic 'anime' style drawings by an uncredited artist, but the first glimpse in to over-complicated insanity appears when you flip either book over. I'll take photos of the 3D metallic women fighting for my next post, but here's the excellent spiel to sell you on the glory of Ryvah:

I don't think Ryvah has anything remotely beautiful, and its certainly not creative, so I guess its squandering a lot of that freedom it reserved.. Most entries in the monster manual are just monsters from Dungeons and Dragons, sometimes renamed. A beguiler is a floating monster with many eyes on stalks that can paralyze its enemies, wow! A blink dog is a dog that teleports! Sadly, comeliness does not apply to animals or monsters, so the blink dogs and beguilers are both uncomely. The game is also ridiculously complicated in completely unnecessary ways, being 'individually unique' means there's no classes or character levels and there's a ton of completely useless non-combat skills that will only ever be used if the GM takes pity on you and shoe-horns it in. I was honestly a bit worried it would be just over-complicated and not crazy enough without all the naked anime girls, but pretty much every page has something that leaves me completely bewildered with how insane it is.

Next post: The amazing backstory which is about 2 paragraphs actual backstory and 15 pages of ham-fisted fantasy novel obviously based on an early play-testing session. And chin cats . Holy shit, chin cats. The highly comely furry illuminati that was born in the computers of the library of congress before time itself began.

Backstory

posted by Count Uvula Original SA post

Ryvah
Part 2: Backstory
Ryvah is set far in the future, apparently just a renamed version of Earth, "Cultures and civilizations have risen and fallen hundreds of times." Humans created the first civilization, and then built giant machines that piss nature itself off and warp reality. The main effect of reality warping was magic flying everywhere and making a bunch of generic fantasy creatures. Since then, different races have taken turns conquering the world. Modern cities are built on top of the remains of older ones, and knowledge of magic is passed down from generation to generation. Why the world is stuck with middle-ages/early renaissance is never explained, so I'll assume it's chin cats meddling. We are not told what the current state of the world is like, but the adventure portion of the backstory starts in an Elven city, called New Itosh.

Bows and swords are looked down upon in New Itosh. Magic is the driving force of the city, and determines social hierarchy. A posh Elven (and male) witch named Kytoon and the very special Pya, an exceptionally tall and ostracized sorceror, are planning on leaving the city, to find... alchemy (???). We're told Pya will be joining Kytoon on his expedition, and then we're told that she can't go on the expedition with Kytoon. Afterwards, she blows herself up and Kytoon is forced to bring her along because New Itosh has a shitty justice system, and instead of a hospital or prison you get sent on an arduos journey while badly burnt and bleeding. After setting out, they travel with nothing interesting happening for months. Then a dwarf named Grondak beats their asses after calling them 'a bunch of sissies in drag'.

Pya awakens, tied down, severely injured (again), worried she'll be eaten. She weeps as she whispers the same words over and over again-- it doesn't say what words, but she's damn sure saying them. Pya happens to be of the same religion as the priest Robert, who lives with the dwarf, so after some spontaneous god-healing she becomes good friends with him and Grondak. After a brief bugbear outbreak, Grondak tries to flirt with Pya:

It turns out Kytoon and another witch are injured, and stowed in the camps other tent. The camp only had two tents, so it's somewhat questionable that they separated and bound one of the injured. After sharing some moments of bonding, Pya and her new friends round up the two missing witches and nurse the injured back to health. Kytoon is anxious to continue their search for alchemy, so Pya shares a heart-felt goodbye with the two men, pausing to create ridiculous circumstances under which she might see them again. Her plan is literally just, "be outside of the most dangerous cave in the area in two weeks time."

The party arrives at Trim Town, a human settlement that shows signs of bugbear attacks. The town is not well off, children play with pinecones and the humans' wagons are haphazardly made. They find someone who is less poor, and Kytoon asks where to find some alchemy. The human laughs, presumably at the ridiculous nature of the question, before informing the group that there's no ministry of magic, and instead there's a mage night every Wednesday at Tonk's Bar and Grill. The party heads there three days later-- over the course of which nothing happened --and the mages are dividing profits up from a previous expedition to pay a large mercenary group. The alchemical ingredients they've harvested, 88 lizardman scales, are near worthless. The men aren't particularly upset, but they yearn for high-paying adventure to the most dangerous cave in the area. They depart with a headcount of 22.

Robert and Grondak stop by a town of thieves to get the skinny on Black Mouth Cavern (the most dangerous cave in the area), and after some small moral outrage, they find an Orc-Valkyrie woman. She wears a gothic-looking black lace vest and cloak, along with bronze chainmail, and reads books on the dark arts and witchcraft. When asked about the cavern, she regales them with a tale of her own adventuring party being slaughtered by xorns, a rock beast with 3 arms and 3 legs. After introducing herself as Cogtoe, Grondak steps back, apparently to recite a memorized encyclopedia entry on the beasts, how they are the native enemy of dwarves, and are probably immune to ice. Not having memorized any weaknesses of the beast, they read books for three days straight trying to find one. Finally, having almost exhausted books to read, they find a weakness: a Spirit Rock Wave potion. Grondak says it's 'payback time' and they leave to see the alchemist.

The three do not have enough funds to purchase the potion, even with Cogtoe throwing in all of her money and offering to pawn her 'excess equipment' to help an elven woman she's never met. Robert pawns his holy symbol made of mitheral, which elicits the alchemist to stutter, "Mmm... mmmith... mitheral!!!" The group then leaves with the potion, to camp outside of the Black Mouth Cavern for days, awaiting their rondevou[sic] with Pya. They find a magic tree, and then Pya arrives. It takes the groups two hours to introduce everybody to eachother. Many of the mercenaries are terrified of fighting Xorns, and only seven figures enter the cavern (Pya, Kytoon, Grondak, Robert, Cogtoe, a mage named Shannon, and an archer named Keith). There is an anticlimactic fight, in which all the xorns are killed by the potion, and the story ends with Kytoon selling his share of the loot to buy "a large variety of the local alchemy", and all the other named characters planning further adventures together.


Monster Manual - Chin Cats:

_{I believe this is one of the few images that isn't stolen on Ryvah.com, though it's possible they just couldn't find a higher quality catgirl ultramage.}

Chin cats are beautiful and insanely powerful, having a threat level of 50-- 7 levels higher than the most powerful type of dragon in Ryvah. Though they have a limited population size numbering in the mere hundreds, they are a secret force that serves as the driving force behind global politics. They are, really, just a furry version of NWO/illuminati conspiracies. The book notes that, "attacking a small village of 15-25 chin cats may bring down a wrath so great that genocide of your race might be considered."

Chin cats aren't JUST shadow diplomats, they also control a library that retains all knowledge on the planet, including the cures to all disease and the key to building fountains of youth. The fountains of youth, combined with their supreme combat abilities, makes chin cats effectively immortal in spite of having a natural life span of only 11 years. They only reproduce when a member of their race has died, whereupon the new chin kitten will be given to a set of mortal parents to be raised in ignorance. The condition under which they're inducted in to the conspiracy is... if they can become a powerful mage and figure out how to create a fountain of youth on their own. This leaves a lot of questions: why can't other races figure out how to build these fountains? What happens to the foster parents? Why do they always return to the conspiracy when they've become a supermage? Those who can't figure out the secret to creating a fountain of youth die, alone or with their stupid mortal parents.

The rest of the description is backstory of the universe with more information than the core rulebook's actual section on backstory. In the chin cat's fortress of knowledge are books detailing the origin of the universe, where, before matter, there was simply conscious thought (2,222 individual identities, to be precise) that would philosophize or debate, with "tremendous accomplishments done"-- remember this is before matter itself existed, so I'm not sure what they accomplished. Eventually, these thought-beings get bored, and in the most confusing sentence ever decide to... do stuff:

With matter created, the thought-beings start fighting for power and they all die, and eventually the one that disappeared for millions of years comes back and becomes a monotheistic god. Things continue all Earth-like until the humans invent the technology of Hathawatts, which removes the laws of physics and allowed the people to find their creator, who they gave a robot body to and named Meldor. After the lead scientist and Meldor's friend, Hathawatts Fodkred, gets murdered, Meldor decides to throw a tantrum and destroy all life. He then creates chin cats, to serve as a personal army in his war against life (even though he uses 'total entropy' to destroy the universe). Then he recreates the universe without Hathawatts. If you're confused by all the Hathawatts, it's apparently simultaneously a technology, race, and person. He then floods the world with magic, which leaves him without the power to destroy the universe again. Finally, chin cats escaped destruction in the previous universe and escape in to the new one, completely immune to what remains of Meldor's power. Meldor then uses his robot body to have sex with some of chin cats.

The racial descriptions for player races is the same in the book as on the website , so the only other one I'm going to do is humans before moving on to weird beasts like Jackelweres and Bullets. I was also too lazy to take photos over the past couple days. I'll edit some in to this post tomorrow or Sunday.

It's also worth noting that the backstory in the chin cat's description somewhat contradicts the main backstory, in that Meldor unleashes magic in the former, and technology does it in the latter. They are similar in that technology is ultimately responsible for magic entering the world, though.

Next time: Humans, Bullets (male bullets often accidentally eat the sperm of other bullets. That's important.), and the basics of character creation.

e: Grammarz!

Experience and stats -- also, retardation and death

posted by Count Uvula Original SA post

Part 3: Experience and stats -- also, retardation and death

Introduction:
Character creation starts with the standard fare of name, race, height, and age. Every race has six age milestones, child, adolescent, middle age, senior, and finally, Daily Illness Check Incremental Point, or DICIP. It's pretty much a fancy way of saying "So old they're shrivelling up and dying", and every day they gain an increasing chance of getting a horrible illness that will kill them. I am not sure why you can create a child or dying husk as a player character, but I'm guessing it comes down to wanting to give players Ryvah brand freedom. We'll be creating an example character, if just for the challenge of actually applying the forthcoming insanity; the book warns us to not pick a race until after reading th next section, so I'm naming her Betty Batbrain and she'll be 2 years old.

Skills, the first item on our learning list, are divided in to Category skills, Group skills, and Basic skills, each of which contains a number of the type following it. As an example, the basic skill Axe is in the Melee group, which is in turn in the Combat group. In addition, each skill scales off of two character stats, and you get to pick any size of dice, take two dice of that size, designating one positive and one negative, before adding both to your skill roll. The end result, if you pick d20s for your roll, is a formula of (Basic+Group+Category+Stat1+Stat2+1d20-1d20). This does not apply to spells, which have their own individual checks, though your stats will always apply in that they determine how many times you can cast a spell. A pretty apparent problem with the skill system is that every single part of character progression draws from the same experience pool, meaning your only choice is the narrowness of your skill focus. Because groups and categories don't differ in their effect from basic skills, there's an obvious optimal pattern in levelling skills, which is dependent on how many skills you want levelled in a group, e.g. if you want to level one skill as much as possible, you put 2250 experience in to its basic skill, then 3000 in to its group skill.

Next is Race innates. They have skills and abilities, both of which require experience to unlock and have age group requirements (i.e. a yeti can't buy its "+10 punch" skill until it is 10 years old, when it starts to count as an adolescent). The lack of innates, by the way, is the only reason playing babies is less effective than playing older characters. Every player race except humans has innate skills they have to take at birth, but after that they can go their entire life without purchasing another one. There are a couple silly aspects to this, such as the lack of human innates making a 5 year old boy physically equal to a 40 year old man, unless the GM intervenes and cuts their exp (or more likely, tells them to play an actual character or fuck off). You need to have all skills of lower age group learned before you can learn further innate skills-- yeti can't get his adulthood HP bonus until he's already gotten his puberty punching bonus. Now, here's the kicker: For some reason, there's no hard rule against ignoring this, but if you try to do so, the GM gets react with one of the following:


After that fun table of ways the game master can fuck you over instead of simply making your correct your character sheet, it's time to pick a race! Betty Batbrain will be a succubus, who fortunately don't have any age groups besides Adult and DICIP so being 2 years old won't get that creepy. She's also 7,000 pounds, though she certainly doesn't look it. I mentioned it in passing before that levelling up stats and skills takes from the same experience pool, this is true for all character progression in the game, but during character creation we're given experience pools with specific uses:
100,000 experience for stats,
10,000 for personality skills,
10,000 for restricted skills,
26,000 for languages,
10,000 for all other skills.



Stats:
Strangely, stats, in spite of being relatively straight forward and not having much room for imaginative language, manage to be weird and vaguely offensive. The book notes that having a balanced 7 levels in each stat will cost you 90,000, leaving you with enough experience to bring one stat up to 8. Many things count as the the domain of two or three stats, and those without usually let you apply their single stat twice; this is why you'll see a bunch of things under multiple stats in the list below:


Strength is relatively normal, it effects your carry weight, to hit, and endurance. If a single attack against your character does (10 * Strength + Current HP) you instantly die. Betty is about 'average' with a strength of 5. Also, your ability to carry things is determined by (Weight x Strength / 7), so Betty's horrible 7,000 pounds of flesh gives her the ability to carry 5,000 pounds of gear. I'm not sure she can fly anymore, however.


Dexterity affects to hit, amor class, charm, and... juggling. Juggling is the only thing it gets applied twice to, I guess because it has both a AC and to hit bonus. It has a table showing limitations imposed by having less than 4 levels in it:
This means there is never any reason to have 2 or less levels in the stat. This is the perfect opportunity to give Batbrain a 0 and make her a cruel palsy-afflicted overweight sex beast, but instead we're giving her a dexterity of 8. I'd rather have her juggling the corpses of her enemies than worthless.


Perception gives double bonuses to hearing, smell, sight, sight, tracking, and alertness, and also affects armor class, ranged to hit, and piloting (animal, boat, etc.) Very simple, has a chart that manages to be normal, perception is boring. Betty has a perception of 1, giving her just enough perception to feel direct contact, though she is slightly worse than a t-rex in that she can't see motion over 20 feet away.


Intelligence is great for magic users, affecting all magic checks. Strangely, magic saving throws are the only stat that apply four stats, with bonuses from intelligence, comeliness, and a 2x bonus from Spirit. It's non-magical counterpart of armor-class has. In addition to magic, intelligence effect a couple dialogue checks (speaking, bargaining, interrogation) and some miscellaneous things like reading and tactics.
The weird table for the stat is as follows:
Since Betty's always dreamed of being a sorceress, she'll have an intelligence of 10. It's another of those gimme skills where there's absolutely no reason to take less than 5. Also, it's possible to have an intelligence that allows use of clubs but not hammers. What the hell do you do, hold the hammer by the heavy end?


Spirit is a counterpart to Intelligence, though it's pretty much just luck with some magic bonuses attached. In fact, 'luck' is one of the rolls it will double up on, along with magic saving throws and miracles (The system of magic used by clerics). It also effects riding animals, charming animals, and charming things in general. It also has the weirdest table:
The 13-16 block is there pretty much for the benefit of beast masters, but a high spirit score is also highly useful in that you get an amount of free-use mana equal to you spirit every day, which is usually the only way to cast the same spell multiple times in a day. Betty get a special bonus to mana regen that we can abuse, so she gets a spirit of 4, meaning she will never win when gambling, ever. It does leave her a little vulnerable, having a pre-comeliness magic saving throw of 14.


Comeliness ! The book saves the best for last. 2x bonus to charm, 'good looks' (is that for flavor or can you actually make a good looks roll? I don't know), and... resistance to poison. Okay... You also get a bonus to armor class that isn't explained. Hitting pretty people isn't easy, I guess. Anyway, time for another table!

Betty gets an 8, and we have 8k of our 100k experience left, enough to bring our terrible perception up to 5.


Next we get a freeby: a +3 bonus to a stat and a category, group, and basic of your choosing. Since we're not going on to actual skills this post, we'll only apply that stat gain to comeliness, bringing it to 11, before moving on to racial innates. I won't do a write-up on the succubi race, but it's pretty normal up until the rapey parts that include the sentence, "The fatal kiss of death sucks the life force from his body, caushing him to climax, spilling seed all over himself." The gist of it is that a succubus is any horny woman who had a spell of immortality cast on them; when cast on people who are not horny women, it turns them in to some other abomination. We can be a non-human succubus, but it requires game master approval since you're effectively doubling your innate racial skills that way, so we'll just stick to the simplicity of humanity. I'm also not sure if Betty Batbrains being 2 years old makes her a human toddler (who had a high enough libido to effect the spell) or a woman of indiscriminate age who has been a succubus for 2 years. Anyway, let's look at our starting skills, the ones we get for free:

The brackets indicate it's not a skill or other standard effect, most races have one-- or zero --bracketed skills so succubi are somewhat exceptional here. External skills will be explained next post but the actual effects are exactly what it says on the tin, it gives us +4 to the skill category 'Combat' at night. Betty Batbrain's weakness is she takes double damage from arrows, silver, light, and energy drain. Obviously, "Regenerates mana after sex" stands out in the list as weird and creepy, but it does give us an advantage in that Betty can take a bunch of spells that have greater mana costs than she has spirit without penalizing herself. We have an option of taking '+50 life drain' for 5000 exp; I have no idea what the +50 does since the mana cost, saving throw, and damage for it are all fixed. After Betty has life drain, she's a full-fledged succubus and can purchase from the next level of innates, which includes some ridiculously nice bonuses like +3 Comeliness for 5000 exp. However, there are no direct combat skills in the 5000 cost tier and life-drain is weak, so it might not be a good purchase at this point.


Monster Manual - Bullets:

What is a bullet? It's a truly well-designed animal. They're also known as sand sharks, and burrow in plains and deserts in an endless pursuit of food. They are shaped vaguely like bullets, and in spite of being truly well-designed, look pretty silly. Although not outright aggressive, their complete lack of fear, incredible strength, and resistance to damage makes them highly intimidating should you get in the way of their pursuit of food. They can knock over buildings in order to eat the debris, and will eat anything ranging from rocks to carcasses. Their body is designed so much with the goal of eating stuff in mind that their reproductive system is based around female bullets eating a carcass that a male has ejaculated on to , which appears to be the only time a bullet won't eat something dead that it finds: when it's ejaculating on to the rotting corpse. Unfortunately for bullets, it's relatively common for a male to unknowingly eat a corpse that another male has left semen on. They also can't recognize eggs of their own species so they will often eat those too, necessitating that the female lay a large number of eggs just to reduce the risk of cannibalism.



No humans this post because it's already really long.

Extended skills, mostly useless shit

posted by Count Uvula Original SA post

I gave back the Ryvah books when preparing to play in an actual campaign Said campaign got cancelled like 6 hours later .



Part 4: Extended skills, mostly useless shit
After setting up stats for Betty Batbrain last round, we're left with reserved exp for personality skills, restricted skills, and language skills. 10,000 experience for the former two, 26,000 for languages. We'll also cover external skills this post, woo my favorite system. Betty, for those just tuning in, is a 7,000 pound 2 year old succubus with high comeliness and decent spellcasting stats. We're playing this by ear, but there's pretty much no way to screw your character up in these blocks of skills outside of dumping your normal exp pool in to them (Betty still has all 10,000 of her starting general use exp left).


Personality Skills:
These determine... your character's personality! It's really just a way of turning roleplaying in to game mechanics, and besides a few peculiar issues I think it's actually a good system. It only applies to NPCs, and it works similar to alignment in D&D, in that people with similar traits get along better. Antonyms aren't formally recognized so personality traits someone dislikes do not correlate (i.e. someone who's got 20,000 points of EVIL personality doesn't necessarily dislike Lawful). A huge amount of it is left up to DM discretion but I assume you atleast get increased Control (which will not be explained for a long while-- 'politics' are the last non-glossary section of the book) when dealing with people similar to yourself.

Personality skills count as a single skill category, divided in to 5 groups, further divided in to 67 basic skills; I had to manually count them You're allowed to level up group and category skills but the book recommends against it, as making some weird-ass personality matrix is hard to roleplay and doesn't really make much sense in the first place. The 5 groups are Animal (things like sneaky, territorial, passionate), Ego, Good, Innocent, and Semi-Evil; they have weird names but they're a pretty good base to build on top of. Unfortunately, once we get in to the actual basic skills, things start looking a lot more Ryvah-y. Royalty and noble are basic skills, Wild is under Ego instead of Animal, and Semi-Evil has the lion's share of the traits, with a total of 19 basic skills so you can describe just how, exactly, your character is a total knob (they can be a torturous, enslaving, bully of an alcoholic , for example). Innocent, predictably, is the second largest group, with 16 of the basics, which include flirt, carefree, passive, and... wise ? Neither of these groups would be a problem if they were in a context that didn't have a bunch of weird rapey pedophile things, but that's not the case. I mean, not a problem outside of completely weird decisions like wise being under the umbrella of innocence.

Now, back to Betty Batbrain, who is currently devoid of personality. Since her power is pretty reliant on sleeping with people 3 times a day, we'll give her 6 ranks in Flirt, 4 in Fearless, and 4 in... Loud. Ta-dah, we now have a boisterous, fearless flirt of an overweight succubus. There are actually 4 directly sexual personality traits, with a couple that are tangentially related, but there's a distinct lack of anything that even approaches prudishness.


Restricted Skills:
These are completely unexplained, but they're mostly occupational skills and none of them give you any form of direct bonus in combat. Carpentry, masonry, various studies of law, all under the restricted skills. There are a lot of things here that work against the setting of Ryvah, like the inclusion of somewhat modern concepts like psychiatry, business law, 'antiques', statistics. While all of those examples except psychiatry have no use outside of jobs, there's still a surplus of insanely complicated skills in the arts and sciences (all rogue skills are scientific). My personal favorite is this modifier for pick-pocketing:

You also get a bonus from having thieving tools, I guess so you can unlock their pockets. Other weirdness in the skill list includes the two religious skills pertaining to the Greek Pantheon and Catholicism, in spite of there being a living robot god in the world who is constantly banging catgirls.

Charm, under the group Psychology, is most thematically in line with being a succubus but it's a goddamn hassle in that you need to reroll every couple rounds to keep something charmed and has no application besides stopping fights. Instead Betty will be a master of mind-control because it feeds off her two highest stats and seems to be utterly game breaking at high levels, she takes 6 ranks in the skill (using up all her restricted skill points). How mind control works is, you take a restrained-- or willing --character, and you roll to beat (difficulty+enemy's mind control score+penalties if you don't use the maximum brain-washing period). At a difficulty of 50, you can get someone to do some small task that they won't really think about (say, unlock a door or something), and at a difficulty of 80, you can get someone to do anything you ask for the rest of their life. Betty's comeliness and intelligence bonus gives her a default score of 42, we can use d100s for our skill role to try and get some minions but it probably won't be worth the bother until our base score is 25+ points higher.


Language Skills:
What language you speak. There's the standard Tolkien fare, and a couple European languages. I'm pretty sure we start with common maxed but it never says so, and if we don't we only have enough reserved EXP to get to rank 17-- when 23 is the point where we can 'barely understand' the language. To get to fluency in one language, we need 561,600 exp. We'll dump all of Betty's language exp in to Dragonic (yes, with a g) because, y'know, fuck it.

External Skills:
External skills are interesting and really terribly balanced. You can define them at any time and they give you bonuses under certain conditions, the exp cost of the skill scaling with how often the situation will come up. Things like 'Combat in caves' are considered the highest tier, costing the same amount as a category skill (4k exp). Combat against a common type of enemy (i.e. Combat against orcs) is in the 1k exp range. This continues on, and the costs for non-combat skills have no guidelines and are up to the GM. Where it gets really psychotic and weird is the lowest tiers, it costs 60 EXP for a +1 combat bonus against one guy , and since you can purchase these skills at any time, purchasing cheap combat bonuses against any mean motherfuckers who cross your path has a variety of advantages over purchasing higher tier external skills. If the GM uses the same specific target/specific day costs for skills as combat, we can get +10 (+5 against this thing, +5 for doing whatever today) to any roll for a thousand exp before exponential cost increases become noticeably large.



Monster Manual - Human :


Ryvah relies on the ever common 'humans have unlimited potential for good or evil' thing you see in Sci-fi and Fantasy everywhere; as Ryvah puts it: "From the Pope, to Hitler, we are human." On the other hand, humans suck really hard gameplay wise since they have no racial innates at all. Where Ryvah goes Ryvah on humanity is that it never fucking stops talking about moral extremes. Five sentences later the author has moved on to talking about female circumcision in Africa (note: there is no Africa in Ryvah), and you know, we already get it, humans can be assholes. But it keeps going, white people beat their black slaves in early American history, the terrorists who destroyed the Twin Towers believed they were righteous in their actions, police abuse their power and get away with crimes. The book then starts going in to bizarrely specific incidents, an innocent man getting shot by 3 LAPD officers in his sleep, and Ann Geddes got falsely imprisoned for her art because the police considered it child porn-- wait, what why would this be relevant to Ryvah?




What the fuck does that last sentence mean!? This is two paragraphs after he mentioned 9/11 as a footnote of human self-righteousness, I didn't even make the connection the first two times I read the description for Humans . The rest of the article talks about how humans are really goddamn prudish and persecute many other races for their deviant lifestyles that include casual nudity, and the subspecies of humanity that include the Puritans, the French, and the Spanish, of which only the Puritans are described in detail. The Puritans never wear clothing with colors, "They are immaculately clean and shower twice daily, and they wear boxers during the shower." and, oh yeah, you get bonus experience for killing them. "The good thing about puritans is that a character will gain 1,000 experience for every puritan they kill. That is not a joke." , the book tells us, after spending a good 3 dozen words on how shitty and dull their lives are.

I asked Mary, after reading this, why there was such a focus on false pedophilia accusations in the books, her reply:
"Oh, there was this thing with the writer. Accidently accused of pedophilia because a child saw his desktop or sommat. I don't actually know the whole story, I only heard about it in passing."



A dragon approaches!



The Rest of Ryvah:
I'm a little sad things are probably ending on this note, having never actually played the game or met the author, but after the divisive nerd drama that killed the campaign a day before I got to officially join it, chances are slim I'll get to see the books again. Somewhat my fault for not writing these write-ups frequently enough, I guess. I wrote down a few notes for later posts, though:

Politics :
The politics chapter deals with the concept of control. Control is your influence on another person or group of people, it was divided in to two camps which are positive and negative methods of control, but they are mechanically the same.
"Methods of Control: Pussy whipped - Prostitute"
The level of control granted by sex is quality^2.
Having a children with someone increases control... dependent on 'credibility of ownership'

Monster Manual entries :
Goblins are described as weird, redheaded jealous midgets whose natural tendency is to manipulate others by distorting the truth. The examples given are uncomfortably specific and spitefully described, making me think the author is basing it on someone in his own life. Things like "The goblin will gladly show your wife your shirt with another woman's lipstick on it, but what he'll fail to explain is that it was simply your daughter playing with some lipstick."

Satyrs (one of the two male-only races) are the single worst thing I found in the Ryvah sourcebooks; they regain mana only when actively trying to rape or seduce women, and they have an uncomfortably long description of how they get a harem of seduced women and then just throw the women back to their previous existences (where they'll be ridiculed for going off with a satyr) as they get pregnant.


Ryvah is freedom,
~Count Uvula