I read the first couple chapters or whatever, and I don't know if it was a bad translation or something but man made in abyss sucks. The characters have zero personality and there wasn't any kind of purpose or goal besides going deeper. Just dumb.

>>85293583
If the mystery of the abyss doesn't hook you then the series isn't for you.
I was enraptured by the setting when I saw this scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bR1glLPtaY

Ran a homebrew game in 5E for it. Honestly a system specifically for it would be nice, but it worked out fine. Had fun / 10 even with players who had no clue what it was.

>>85293616
How much of the horror and lethality aspects of the setting did you include?

>>85293663
I had a character have fun times in Bondrewd's testing chair. Invasive data gathering and surgeries included.

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>>85293719
Based

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>>85293616
Did you come up with relics?

>>85294019
I mashed up two existing homebrews for Made In Abyss for the campaign, including the relics. I felt most of them worked fine. It was a quick throw together job, so I was pleasantly surprised it worked out so well.

>>85294115
I see. Care to elaborate on the system you ended up with?

>>85294131
I'm not going to pretend I even wrote anything down. I basically took whatever I felt like made sense in the moment and ran with it. I had these two:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KagwFfmQFhWehci_JtCpAwleG-s5AZOA-C4Z9qoPvKs/edit
https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-L48JAHfTB9uFvu88jOE/-LnnJw1aCJ0OzMcnz-3V
open in other tabs which I'd reference and go "yay" or "nay" on for things. I took most of the monster stat blocks, relics, etc from the GM Binder one and took other stuff like poison charts from the google doc. Allowed only humans and disallowed any classes / subclasses with magical abilities. PCs started at lvl 1 and lvled up with each layer they got to. I tend to wing stuff as DM and it has worked out so far.

>>85294248
Thanks m8, gonna look into those

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>>85294248
https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-L48JAHfTB9uFvu88jOE/-LnnJw1aCJ0OzMcnz-3V

Dang, this looks like a really good resource from a brief glimpse. Very well made.

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>>85293565
It's a shame that the official MIA game looks like total shovelware given the potential of the setting.

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>>85294538
The setting is a vehicle for many things, I chiefly love it for the world building the author has put into it and the fantastic ost of the anime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR3Lcp639Sg

Isn't that the borderline hurtcore fantasy manga series where the creator admits that he wants to put his lips on the neck of children writhing in pain?

No thanks.

>>85293565
i literally posted this exact same thing several months ago, and all i got were two fucking shit post replies about how i've never heard of mega dungeons and i lack experience and other bullshit, when it's just plain not true. fuck /tg/ sucks sometimes.

also op, if you want a good system to run Made in Abyss check out Heart, it's fucking incredible for it !!

>>85293590
There is no "mystery of the abyss". Its levels are just excuses for more extreme torture porn and they'll "solve" the abyss by either MC girl or a Mcguffin being the key to reversing its effects through some moppy eyed sacrifice.

It only seems fresh because its not an isekai (yet) and it has horrible things happening to children.

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>>85294669
Well thankfully this thread is a bit more lively.
I made the thread because the new season got me hyped for the setting again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_RG03t7cVE

>>85294693
The mystery of the abyss is in the worldbuilding the author reveals in each layer and the new dangers etc the characters have to face.

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>>85293719
Did you include the madlad himself?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtM2w0Q7S0s

Going back to the point of the thread, a system built more around survival and exploration would serve the purpose of the setting better. Running it in 5E didn't really capture that aspect very well despite the rules for it in the stuff I used. Any recommendations on good survivalist TTRPG systems?

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>>85293749
>>85294993
Bondrewd is easily one of the coolest characters I've seen in fiction.

The anime further elevated him, especially with the music used during his scenes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-x4ttQioNw

>>85294993
Yes. He also pulled the body swap trick on them too after they had "enjoyed" their stay at his place for a bit. Had them get split up while sleeping and go around the place uncovering just exactly what was going on. That's how that one PC ended up in the chair, though he kinda did it willingly because he didn't really know what exactly was going to happen. Very fun times in Ido Front.

>>85295044
Lel. Your players were unfamiliar with the setting beforehand?

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>>85293565
I wanted to get into this show , but the artstyle just turned me off. Should I keep going ? My boss highly recommends it

>>85295108
It gets better as it goes so yes.

>>85293565
>>85293590
Seems gay

But I have to admit, when I heard the concept of Made in Abyss, it's *exactly* how OSR mega-dungeon games felt. So I thought I might like it.

But it's about loli-headed children.

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>>85295217
Cool , Ill give it another go

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>>85295233
The children are just the protagonists trough whom the audience gets to explore the abyss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puCAYN_8G_0

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>>85295253
Remember to also watch the Dawn of the Deep Soul movie which continues from where the first season ends.

>>85295089
Yeah.

>>85295490
Probably the best approach, forewarning of what the setting is like kinda diminishes the mystery and sense of exploration.

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>>85294746
The animation in the op is amazingly fluid.

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>>85295290
I wish the show showcased more of the adult cave raiders. The flamethrower guy for example has a cool as fuck design.

>>85294647
>hurtcore
did you just make up this word?

>>85296468
unfortunately, no.

>>85296536
interesting
>Hurtcore, a portmanteau of "hardcore" and "hurt", is a name given to a particularly extreme form of child pornography, usually involving degrading violence, bodily harm and child sexual abuse.
>Most pedophiles are repulsed by this genre of pornography.
In other words somebody into hurtcore would most likely not be a pedo.

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>>85293565
>kinda want to try a Made in Abyss style campaign
>have no idea how I'd work in the Abyss curse without it being overbearing and annoying
Granted that's sort of the point, but it doesn't seem like it would be fun to severely limit your party's vertical mobility during every encounter in an ecosystem that is highly vertical by nature.

>>85293565
it was originally supposed to be an RPG game and the first few chapters where part of the pitch, but no one picked it up, so he published it as a comic

>>85294997
DCC; an OSR that practically jerks off to the idea of making dungeon crawling the most sadistic brutal thing imaginible.

>>85297524
Nice. I think that's a pretty appropriate basis for a MIA campaign if it allows for using your smarts to ease stuff up. The Abyss is really dangerous, but it's not insurmountable.

>>85296705
That's kinda the point, though I would perhaps ad the caveat that the faster one moves vertically upwards, the harsher/more rapid the onset of the curse is. That would allow the party to slowly get back up vertically without having constantly to deal with vomiting, bleeding etc effects of the curse or at least it's most extreme effects.

>>85297165
Source?

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>>85297719
I forgot that speed played a role in it.
I guess once they got deep enough you could give them a Narehate guide a la Nanachi? But Narehate are kind of exceedingly rare outside the Capital and I don't know how easily you could justify the party running into one. All things considered, Riko is really quite lucky to be the only human in a party with two other members immune to/good at avoiding the Curse.

I guess you could do a party of automatons like Reg but it's been so long since I read the manga that I don't know if that actually makes sense. IIRC it still isn't clear how he even got to the surface.

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>>85295749
I hope thats the quality of animation what the fight scenes with Faputa will have in the anime.

>>85297900
Meinya can allow you to see the curse layers. So, maybe something like that? Though, he's pretty rare too.

>>85297900
>I forgot that speed played a role in it.
I dunno if it canonically does, but imo, I'd implement that sort of caveat to the system for gameplay convenience.

>>85297924
Doesn't Meinya's smell thing only really help with the 5th layer's curse tho, as that's the one that robs one of one's senses.

>>85298059
I'm pretty sure it allows you to see the curse like narehate can.

>>85293565
It's like gamma world but without the shitty jokes

>>85298083
Maybe. I don't remember what it did exactly, the movie isn't that clear and its' been a while since I read the manga. Perceiving the curse/forcefield is something a lot of the fauna of the abyss can do but I didn't get the impression that all narahate/hollows can do it as well. It seemed to be ability particular to Nanachi.

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>>85298116
Speaking off perceiving the forcefield, how would one even implement the "precognition" the abyssal fauna has due to their ability to perceive the flow of the forcefield in gameplay terms? Some sort of ability for them to "react" to player actions "out of turn" or someshit?

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>>85298156
Nechronica's timing system is able to handle abilities like this pretty well. Basically:
>each manuever you can do has an associated 'timing'
>timings dictate when you can declare the maneuver and what order simultaneously declared manuevers resolve
>order from first to last is: Auto, Rapid, Action, Check, Damage
>Autos are always on
>Actions can only be declared on your count (essentially, your turn)
>Rapids can be declared in reaction to Actions, and resolve before Actions. If the result of a Rapid would invalidate an Action then the Action is negated, but the AP for the Action is still spent
>Rapids can only be declared one time per turn per Rapid manuever
>it doesn't matter where you are in the turn order, you can always declare a Rapid if you have the required AP

Basically, you'd load up a creature that has precog with a bunch of cheap Rapid parts under the Nechronica system and it'll be able to react to whatever your party is going to try and do. The fact Rapids can only be used one time per turn means a party can still potentially overwhelm the enemy with numbers/cheap attacks but allows your monster to play ultra reactive in line with the monsters from the Abyss.

>>85298394
Sounds like a decent way of tackling the issue of "future seeing" enemies reaction to players. I haven't played nechronica so I wasn't aware of the system it had in place.

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>>85295749
Faputa has such an adorable design, I hope that the anime does her justice.

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>>85298427
Unfortunately the rest of Nechronica does not easily translate. Instead of an HP system the PCs and NPCs have parts; as in, if you take damage you have to break a part of your character, like your hand or brain. And each part broken is an ability you can't use again until its fixed.
Maybe you could rebrand parts as equipment? That doesn't really seem to jive though.

The other trick is that the Nechronica battle map is pretty abstract. It's essentially a measure of how close or far you are from the front line, measured in five zones. It works very well for Nechronica but I'd expect that in a game set in Made In Abyss you would prefer to have the terrain be it's own character.

>>85293583
You clearly didn't read very well if that's the impression you got, because all of that is objectively untrue.

>>85298463
"smells like sun" is one of those phrases that just doesn't translate very well, the general sentiment that it's meant to be a pleasant thing is there but not quite the exact substance of it

>>85297900
Speed in that certain aspects of the curse can be avoided by going more slowly so you can endure the nausea/pain/disorientation in smaller doses, but also in that the Curse is a sort of constantly shifting energy field that ebbs and flows, becoming denser and more aggressive in some areas and less severe in others. Ascents from the Abyss are as much of a trial as descents, because Delvers need to manage their resources to survive a trip that might take twice a long going up as it took to go down, just because they can get a particularly intense curse reaction in the area they're ascending, forcing them to stop or retreat until they can survive the full return trip.

That said, if you just rush upward as fast as possible, the curse will fuck you up no matter how thin it happens to be in the area you're in.

>>85295030
Shit taste m8

Those monologues and fights were absolutely intolerable

>>85293565
I've been working on material for a game for MiA
sporadically for a lot of years.
Essentially I decided to focus on adult delvers new to Oorth, that way I could introduce players slowly.
The idea would be to have players in a sort of debt treadmill, they owe their sponsors so much, and the way to pay it off is to delve for artifacts. But the best way to get deeper and get to more valuable artifacts is to have some of your own. So it would become a sort of meta-game of keeping the stuff best for delving on hand, but having to give up some stuff as well.

I also very quickly decided that the majority of player advancement would be in artifacts, not levels or other skills. Which is why DnD is really bad for this. MiA's artifacts are, as far as we know, the only source of "magic" in the whole world. So players might advance in mundane skills like survival and rope tying, but they aren't going to cast any spells, unless its an artifact.'

For survival features, I decided on a system an anon suggested a long time ago that I really liked. Essentially, the players will roleplay through a basic survival task, setting up camp, hunting for food, etc. And once they do this once, they can then do it again, for essentially the same result but don't have to actively roll for any results. Ie, if their first hunt is a shitshow and one of them gets injured and they barely get enough to feed them, the injury and amount of food will be the same, but they don't have to make any checks. They can elect to do the task again at a later time, roleplaying through the whole process again, for a potentially better result, which they then keep as their "base results" from then on.

>>85300572
You are the one with shit taste

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>>85298463
Most valuable treasure of the abyss...

I remember reading this several years ago, is the story finished? have there been any interesting developments?

>>85302868
>is the story finished?
far from it, it's one of those mangas that will keep going until author dies

>>85302868
Second season of the anime that covers the hollow village arc began few weeks ago.

>>85293583
>The characters have zero personality
it's pedoshit, they don't have to
you can safely assume that any weebshit praised or named by someone in 2022 that isn't your seasonal shonen is without fail going to be pedoshit

>>85302868
The latest chapter introduced one of the previously only mentioned white whistles.

>>85293583
Wtf are you talking about. The characters in the story have very strong characterization and personalities.

>>85300261
The curse of the 4th layer would probably fucking kill you via blood loss if you were to rush upward äs in that layer.

>>85296705
If whatever your system is has some kind of contested checks in it and dedicated stats for physical hardiness you could make the curse an increasingly difficult check depending on how deep your players are at a given time.

>>85301389
I guess my biggest question with your idea is what happens when the party rolls well on the first survival check. Do they just do fine for the rest of the delve? Do they have to start the process over again when entering a new environment or layer?

I assume you have a plan to keep things interesting outside of survival; could a new development force them to try making camp again? Say they realize they're being followed and attempt to hide?

>>85293583
>The characters have zero personality
this is true even though i like it kek

>>85308482
>Do they have to start the process over again when entering a new environment or layer?
Yeah that was the plan. Wildly different circumstances would make their "experience" on the prior checks irrelevant. Like foraging in layer one is wildly different than layer two.
Modifiers might also come into play, good results on one layer's rolls, might lead to applying those skills elsewhere, for example.

I need to playtest it a bit before actually committing to the system, there's a lot I can tweak with it.

The other part of survival is having a lot of non-combat encounters the players have to deal with. Scaling cup plants, moving from place to place on the walls of the third layer. Complications like the route they took down not being accessible on the way up, rockslides, treefalls, scarcity of resources. Encounters with wildlife that are more than just ooga booga monster, now you combat. Things like evidence of tracks, or you sight a nest early but need to get past it. All of this complicated by the Curse.

The trouble with survival games is that they will necessary almost always involve nitpicky resource tracking, and I'd like to eliminate that as much as I can, but especially for a game like this, where planning your delve and how much time is involved in moving UP at the end of your expedition is more important than DOWN simply requires good bookeeping on both the player and GM side. I can turn that to a bit of an advantage though, because thats something I can "attack" instead of the PCs. Like a party health pool, their resources are just as important as their personal health. Setbacks in time are just as bad as injuries, enough of them and you could starve before getting back to Oorth.

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Makes me laugh that a pedo can create a genuinely interesting setting about a giant hole in the ground.

>>85310635
Tsukushi is a fucked up dude. He loves his character more than the most dedicated fans. He adores what he does and when he's not sniffing his collection of Nanachi dolls, he can genuinely write and draw some of the most spectacular whimsical/horrifying bullshit that is unmatched by any other comic author in the world. I wish he had the restraint to keep his more perverse inclinations off the page, but that's the price you pay to see where Mr. Tsukushi's magic murder hole goes.

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>>85310813
He also got talent for designing absolutely adorable characters.

>>85296197
Manga's getting into some adult raiders now.

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>>85310931
Yeah, I'm pretty exited to see what Sjaro's team is gonna be about.

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It can work as a TTRPG setting but you'll need to be really good at environmental descriptions or the grandeur of the place won't come across. Otherwise make sure to abstract the curse somewhat since the players exploration is, as usual, abstract. You'll also need to populate the various levels a lot more. Thinking in D&D terms, most people play below level 9. Most parties will spend their time in the first or second layer, occasionally diving down the third and into the later layers. The manga manages to sidestep most of the underside of Orth's factions because Riko and company go through them so quickly, but there's a heavy implication that a lot of shady interpersonal drama and fighting goes down in the upper layers between groups of delvers.

>>85311009
Yeah, the last few chapters that have focused on stuff that's going on back in Orth has made it pretty clear that usually the Delvers are at best just cordial to each other and generally tend to be suspicious with each other and even form rivalries etc. Them working together in big teams is the exception rather than the norm.

>>85311040
He's just copying old posts to try and pretend there is more than one of him. Don't reply and maybe the schizo fuck will get bored. Better, the fewer posts about him, the more on topic we can be.

>>85311009
Its actually whats left unsaid and unshown that I find most interesting about the Abyss. Like you said, the daily life of an average delver is an interesting and basically unexplored part of the story.
Obviously delving is lucrative, or there wouldn't be a whole city dedicated to it. But how do they sell shit? How are artifacts classified and priced? There's mentions of an auction house, and also several people talk about certain artifacts as things that are known about, meaning lots of copies exist of them. Things like the "grenades" used by Riko and co, or the umbrella they try and block the porcupine with have known properties and clearly people have found lots of them, so do they have, like, shops selling "household" artifacts, or is most of that stuff a foreign market?
Also how do people find most of their artifacts? Big caches of dozens of items? Do they break into old structures full of shit? Are they just lying about? Buried underfoot?
How much could even be on the third layer? Its a literal cliff. How do you even survive there if you aren't child sized and can fit in the caves? Its explicitly said the people who try gliding or flying most often die in the attempt.
As for whistles, besides the White, how do you get them? Black whistles are seemingly pretty rare, and each level "entitles" you to go deeper, but how do they manage that? Is it more like an unnofficial "welp we've decided you're ready" thing, or is it an official and recorded "pass" of sorts? Something in between with like a Mentorship program maybe?

There's just so much completely unsaid. which makes speculation a lot o fun.

>>85310635
In a way he's like Giger, fucked-up dude making cool art

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>>85311079
Her hair and eye color didn't change when she became a narehate. Just got brown fur.

Other anon, don't reply. They unironically live on (You)'s and direct replies give fuel for making arguments.

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>>85294248
Oh man, some of those image pages on gmbinder have formatting issues.

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>>85311104
In the Ganja team flashbacks one of the interface units tells that sometimes relics just appear essentially out of thin air where there were none before.

Also the tier system of the relics seems to be based on their potency/power for the most part, with the more magical relics being in the more valued tiers. Shit like the unheard bell that apparently stops time, or the Zooaholic that Bondrewd used to copy his soul to his underlings being essentially eldrich magical artifacts that do shit that no contemporary technology can replicate. Hence them being classified into the special grade relic tier.

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>>85311119
Downloaded a pdf version, it seems like it's just an issue on the web browser. Shows up correctly in the pdf (though it doesn't seem to have page formatted just right)

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Digging the monster recommendations for each layer

>>85294669
Glad to see someone mentioning Heart, I think that's the perfect system for a Made in Abyss game. A strong focus on exploration and delving between landmarks, each weird and only an uneasy respite from the dangers of the outer world. It rewards flexible thinking and scrounging for any benefits, but can be brutal with just a bit of bad luck and/or letting consequences pile on top of each other. And it naturally involves a tier system for going deeper and reaching more and more disturbing, reality-warping phenomena.

I would love to play a Made in Abyss Heart game.

>>85311208
Sniffed out the corebook. Heart seems pretty neat. Maybe a fan sourcebook would work.

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>>85311128
Was Gangway ever ranked on the relic tier list?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5trbBL2DCTg

>>85311104
The white whistles are unique for being actual relics themselves, but my understanding was that the colored whistles were the in-setting equivalent of certification tiers. If you've been to a certain layer and returned you're entitled to wear the proper color.

>>85313123
I think that there's some age limits and tests/trials one has to go trough to earn a whistle.

In the seeker camp they make comment on how Marluk has a blue whistle despite being around the age of Riko and Reg and how it is an exception due to him being Ozen's apprentice.

>>85313123
I think it's more that if you meet the age, training, experience, etc you can become certified to be a higher tier of whistle which allows you to go deeper. The only exception of course are white whistles.

>>85313123
When it comes to white whistles the public in general doesn't even seem to know that they are relics and how they are made. It seems that only white whistles and maybe high ups in the cave raider guild actually are aware of the fact that they are made out of human sacrifices.

>>85300186
I'm imagining it like a freshly washed towel that's being dried out in a sunny day.

>>85315654
> Even Ozen didn't tell her about it.
Which is kinda strange given that without a White Whistle Riko's journey would have ended in Idofront. Maybe that's what Ozen hoped for. I mean, how would Riko have gotten the elevator moving, unless Bondrewd activated it for them?

>>85293616
Does 5e even work with such a deadly setting?
Something like dungeon crawl classic is more fitting in my opinion.

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>>85302552
>I love it when my villain takes minutes out of a fight to stab a robo-boy in the leg and comment about how pain hurts
>I love it when my villain makes no choices that aren't directly forced by the setting
>I love it when my villains have no reaction except "Subarashi" anytime anything happens
If you sat down at my table I would tell you to leave

>>85316263
Nigga it wasn't a fight for Bondrewd, it was a scientific experiment. He at no point wanted to destroy Reg, he at best wanted to subdue him and then study him & dissect him. Thats why he lost, he underestimated team Riko.

>>85315689
My estimation is that Ozen's opinion on the matter is:
>Riko will make it or she'll die.
Whether Riko knows the nature of the whistles or not is probably immaterial. I doubt any of the other White Whistles knew what they were getting into either.

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>>85316379
>Nigga gets btfo by a child, micromachine, and the world's smallest furry
>I-it's cool, bro. I-i was just experimenting
Also, the pacing of the series is fucking horrible. Barely anything is explored in depth. Ironic for a mine based piece of fiction. If there was a pic of Bondrewd literally getting fisted, I would post it. Alas, this is the best I can do.

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>>85316533
Pride cometh before the fall.

But if you look at his dialogue during his fighting with Reg you can clearly see that he's chiefly exited to test and see the capabilities Reg has.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5trbBL2DCTg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM6JMZx1CLc

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>>85316660
He's excited to murder his daughter. His plan and dialogue are shit tier 'science' even by anime standards. I don't care to white knight for the lame ass faggot with MPD. Weebs always make originally crappy ideas like Sybil worse and cringe. MPD villains are always stupid creep bastards, but anime takes it to another level. Like that dude from Yu Yu Hakusho who kept getting bad touched by his demon 'partner'.

>>85293583
What? You think Riko, Reg, Nanachi don't have strong personalities? You think Ozen doesn't have a strong personality?

Watch the anime anon.

>>85312331
Most of his relics were never publicly auctioned and ranked.

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>>85316854
I thought they were a good pair, despite being evil and crazy. Loyalty counts for something.

>>85316854
If you want people to respond to your bait you at least should make it coherent m8.

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>>85316854
Pruska consented to being made into a cartrige m8.
The anime cut this out for some reason from the whole Pruskha flashback.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c09gHQ08CtI

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>>85317052
>little girl raised in hallucination zone can consent to being made into a spirit juicebox
I read the manga too, my boi. Bondrewd is garbage, much like the fight scenes. You could barely tell what was going on when the furry princess spazzed out during that stupid arc that meant nothing.

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>>85317095
Very shit post, but very cute Faputa.

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>>85316987
>yandere eyes
The loyalty isn't the problem with that sort...

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>>85317119
Cutest couple. The most valuable treasures of the netherworld.

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>>85317119
It is very obvious that she eats people. Simple as. Nice shitpost, artard. Picrel.

>>85316533
>Reg is basically a walking MOAB
>Bonedrewd thinks that's neat and fucks around with aforementioned MOAB
>MOAB eventually explodes in his face
That encounter isn't very complicated. Yeah Bonedrewd's an idiot for letting it get that far but he hasn't had a legitimate fear of death since who knows how long.

>>85316854
>He's excited to murder his daughter.
Prushka was always adopted under the pretense that she would be turned into a cartridge. He's trying to turn her into a second whistle. He's grooming her.

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>>85317370
Narahate villagers are Faptua's rightful snacks.

>>85317370
>It is very obvious that she eats people.
Pretty sure that's supposed to be karmic turnaround for them eating her mother's offspring during the founding era of the village.

>>85311184
Dragons sure seem to fit most layers lel. I assume they would work as stand ins for some abyssal creatures.

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Anyways, I've been reading Heart and it does seem like a great MiA system though I have no idea how to translate the Classes over. How many 'classes' of people go into the Abyss? There's guild Delvers, Pirates, maybe pack mules...

>>85317682
I don't think that classes really fit into the way cave raiding works. To me it seems that cave raiding is much more dependent on the experience and individual skills of each raider along with their gear, resulting in countless different types of raiders who each have their own tricks and skills up their sleeve from their experience. I would be hard pressed to classify any of the adult delvers we've seen in any proper class description.

How would you implement the discovery of the local fauna/flora and materials? Is there a system that could make the whole trial and error process interesting?

>>85317825
Given that so much of the abyss is uncharted and uncategorized you'd probably be entirely justified in having some sort of generator system to produce critters and plants for the players to encounter.

>>85317833
What I meant is the following: the players are descending the abyss to study it, right? So that includes charting new zones and getting information about the local flora and fauna, or about some minerals and the like that could be used for something.

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>>85317948
I don't think that studying the abyss is the main goal of most raiders. Most cave raiders are there to hunt for relics. However one would guess that the Cave Raider Guild rewards raiders who bring back useful information, samples, maps, sketches & descriptions of fauna and flora etc. You could give a mechanical incentive in the form of such information itself being financially valuable to the players if you want to encourage them to explore more I think.

If I was running the game I'd probably actually encourage the players to draw sketches based on descriptions of the monsters etc found in the abyss lel, though it might be a bit too much effort on their part.

>>85317948
In Heart you can reduce the difficulty of traveling between known locations by establishing a "connection" between them. I think categorizing flora and fauna, probably including defeating or collecting some noteworthy samples, would be a good way to establish that connection.

>>85317997
>If I was running the game I'd probably actually encourage the players to draw sketches based on descriptions of the monsters etc found in the abyss lel, though it might be a bit too much effort on their part.
That's what I'd like, but I would probably attempt this style with players I know may be interested in this aspect.
As for the rest, bringing back useful information is certainly something the guild may want, and I was wondering whether there are some systems in which alchemical experiments and the like are well-implemented (testing materials and their properties etc)
That could be cool with the right group.

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>>85318020
I can't find anything on Heart. Tell us about it in exchange for this pic of a elf girl wut do?.

>>85318212
Just grab it from the Pbta-n-Stuff mega from the PDF Share thread.
But the gist of it is it's about delving down from the relative safety of the near-surface down to the depths of the earth where a bizarre reality-warping Heart observes the world around it. It's full of gore and eldritch shit. The gameplay loop revolves around declaring a delve to get to a new location, which is always hard and dangerous because of the weird shit all over, then you basically "attack" the delve as though it was a monster with narrative options, handle any obstacles the GM throws at you, collect as much junk and trash as you want, and when you get to a new place you spend the loot to remove the damages you suffered on the delve.
PCs level up by choosing plot beats that they want to accomplish in the session, and pick new abilities from their class when they make those beats happen.

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>>85318276
Thanks, will do. Have more female elves in recompense.

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>>85320972
>>85318212
Anon, Mare is a boy.

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>>85302920

>>85293565
I've wondered if we took the global yearly production of garbage and waste, how long would it take to fill the Abyss?

>>85321219
Nice

>>85322401
Abyss would turn that garbage into relics

did everything get nuked? I swear this had over 155 replies a moment ago

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>>85321219
A criminally under-illustrated boy. Hope more art comes out.

>>85323657
Seems that the shit poster calling every one itt pedos and trying to bait people into arguments got yeeted

Anyone familiar with a system that is focused on alchemy? Think of Atelier series but for pen and paper rpgs.

>>85294503
i think it looks decent but it seems more focused on the survival elments rather than visual or asthetic fidelity
i think it should have had a longer development cycle though

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>>85323739
Wtf? I love jannies now?

>>85311128
>In the Ganja team flashbacks one of the interface units tells that sometimes relics just appear essentially out of thin air where there were none before
If occurs to me that you could pretty easily leverage phenomenon like this to essentially steer the party/manage their power level if you treat the artifact spawns as being managed by some sort of central system. Although maybe that's me taking a bit too much license with things/being too used to Nechronica's management system.

>>85323978
The fact that relics can appear where they weren't before also makes "backtracking" and exploring places the party has already been in again worthwhile.

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>>85323978
Dumb potato

Reminds me of the novel, The Descent by Jeff Long. Highly recommend reading it if you're into weird spooky never-ending cave shit

>>85316898
Didn't Bondrewd outright steal Zooaholic or whatever the soul copying relic is?

bumb

Anyone have links to a big repository of magic items? Or maybe a book/pdf to suggest?

If progression is mostly going to be tied to Relics, then you need an absolute assload of Relics to be able to give to players. Even if they aren't strictly MiA themed, a bit of inspiration for a big list like that could be useful.

I had plans early on to give them something like a helmet or goggles that would let them maneuver in the Curse a bit easier as a group, but make the Curse worse for the person using them, on top of removing their actual ability to see.
Another idea was a sort of grotesque living armor, rarely found complete. So delvers often come across the gloves or boots, usually not even as a pair. They're good equipment and don't wear out, but they feel fucking weird to wear. Pants and the Chestpiece would be rare to find, and be really good armor. But you'd be able to see why the other bits feel weird, the pieces feed off dead skin and other bodily detritous. No one has ever found a helmet, but rumors of one to "complete the set" exist. I was thinking it would be really good and "upgrade" the other bits if you wore them all at once, but its lightly drawn to the abyss. Wearing it would subtly make you obsessed with the Abyss to the point you just wandered off.
Yah its a classic suit of cursed armor, but abyss themed. I think it fits pretty well though.

>>85293565
pedobear alert

>>85316854
>MPD villains are always stupid creep bastards
Fight Club was generally pretty well received, if perhaps not exactly for reasons the director intended.

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>>85316854
>MPD villains are always stupid creep bastards
Bonedrewd's not MPD. He's duplicitous and doesn't value the lives of others except for how he can exploit them to his own ends. Just because he understands how to be charming/affable doesn't make him a schizo.

>>85324559
Not a terrible idea. You'd have to keep in mind ways to keep backtracking from getting rote though. Maybe a new monster here, a habitat disruption there. Maybe an incursion from a rival/hostile team. There could be opportunities to weave some wider reaching plot threads there, like the impending ecological disaster Riko and friends encounter on the... I think it was second layer? IIRC there were certain insects being pushed out of their habitat by something and some of Bonedrewd's men were attempting to handle it.

>>85333615
The deceptor bugs invading from the sixth layer to the fourth was implied to be due to the whole 2000 years cycle thing

>>85316263
>stab leg
He literally never does that. That doesn't happen fucking once in the fight, how the fuck couldn't you notice that. Also, he's getting at how weird it is that you'd build a combat relic able to feel crippling pain.
>choices forced on him by the setting
Except literally no one else does or has to do what Bondrewd does and he's still despised for how he gets results.
>subarashi
If you're an immortal scientist why wouldn't you be pleased by unusual results?

>>85316533
>>85316660
>>85316854
Lads, Taildrewd/Bedo was one of his White cloaks but Tsukishi has already said himself that the white cloak with the flamethrower/Gyraike was stronger than Bedo. If Bondrewd had wanted to guarantee a win he'd have
>had Umbra Hands grab the girls as he fought Reg
>brought in more white cloak Umbra Hands.

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>>85293565

>>85336780
I don't think this guy watched the series at all desu. There's not a single classic adventure story where danger and horrible things don't intermix with beautiful, wonderous and amazing things. Made in abyss simply depicts the monsterous and the magnificent at equally high levels.

>>85336780
Riko isn't groomed into anything. Every adult in her life tells her to slow the hell down and wait before trying to delve deeper into the Abyss (or to just stop, like Ozen). She has to evade a fucking search party that gets sent after her and Reg sneak out of the orphanage.
Reg wasn't groomed into anything either. He's a living weapon from the Abyss. If he didnt have amnesia he'd be right at home.
Nanachi was groomed/kidnapped and it's treated as an abject tragedy. Bonedrewd is the villain and almost every experiment of his is morally reprehensible.

Besides that, adults get fucked up by the Abyss all the time. Bonedrewd ego kills other delvers to add to his collection, Ozen is a basket case, Riko's dad is probably her mother's whistle (read: dead via curse), and then there's the entire founding saga of the Capital of the Unreturned which is just several chapters of people dying until enough of them transform into Narehate to form a semi-stable settlement.

Yeah the story is dark and grisly but this is possibly the most obtuse reading of the series you could get.

>>85338256
>expecting shitposters to actually give a shit or know anything about the story of MIA.

They are just after (you)s

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>>85293583
> "I gotta climb down into the super death hole to find muh momie!"
> You have no solid confirmation that she's actually alive, and you literally won't be able to come back up after passing a certain point. Additionally, even if she is alive down there and even if you find her, what then - what's your long-term plan? You're going to stay with her until she dies and then... continue to be stuck in a horrible cave for the rest of your life, except totally alone? Also, you are like, eight years old - and even by that low standard you aren't very exceptional - its self-evident that you currently lack the physical and mental faculties needed to survive the perils of the abyss, much less to descend to the bottom intact.
> "B-but I got random robot amnesic to help me and besides... Mommy Milkers!"
> Fuck it, I give up. Go jump in the hole. Do a flip on the way down.

>>85338256
Torka is not Lyza's whistle.

>>85302920
I'll have you know that Berserk is only like 30% pedoshit

>>85293565
>dude what if adventure but GORE and CHILDREN lmfao

>>85339957
I'm behind by like two years atm so i had a feeling that would be wrong. Did they ever actually confirm who her whistle actually was?

>>85340069
yeah you should catch up the next arc is about to properly start and the last few chapters have been great.

>>85339814
It's all but outright stated that Riko's compulsion to go down into the Abyss is a result of her early life and likely not natural. Wanting to go find her mom is probably a rationalization on her part, at least partially.

>>85340081
I heard they finally introduced another Whsitle. I'll have to give it a look this weekend and try to find where I left off.

>>85340230
Bondrewd never raped anyone

>>85296574
your reading comprehension sucks. if it's a subgenre of kiddy porn, then it's still kiddy porn.

Not sure why every mention made in abyss has to devolve into accusations of being a pedo. the author's weird but it doesn't change that he made an interesting world and a good story. personally, I like a story following kids facing dire situations and odds. the world isn't pulling punches on them due to their age. that's realistic and I want to see them succeed even more. If you want to do shit to kids, go die in a fire. if you like a fantasy doing something different, then good for you. if you don't like it, head on out to another thread. Simple as that.

>>85302868
We should be getting close, the protagonists are almost at the bottom of the known Abyss and the author doesn't seem like he's too keen to work on thus project for the rest of his life, but who knows.

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>>85293565
>The ARMEGEDOCK campaign

I actually ran a game based on Made in Abyss a while back. I ran it with Call of C'thulhu set in the soviet union in the late 80s, went pretty well. I'll give you a brief rundown.

>Game starts in 1987/1988 winter in eastern Russia.
>Weird artifacts start popping up in Valdyvostock
>Getting smuggled out to non-soviet nations
>Players investigate to try and find origin and what these artifacts are.
>Higher ups don't want the Kremlin involved after the Chernobyl disaster and while the whole Soviet Union is on the verge of collapse.
>The party eventually gets their hands on a small artifact dug up from the dirt, has weird effects. They go to a University to figure out wtf it is.
>After a few false leads they find a hard phone line to France, and finally trace the group that's been sneaking this shit past the iron curtain.
>Shit's getting shipped along the railway.The group is tasked with going to some small town in siberea where there was a big steel smelter to figure out wtf is going on.
[pic related]
>After some digging, and a bunch of weird encounters, the PC's start finding bizarre mutations among the populace.
>More mutated people are all involved in some underground operation run by "big vlad"
>When they finally get the chance to meet "big vlad" his eyes are orbiting his head like little planets. His mutations (I rolled randomly) are weirder than anyone elses.
>There's cracks under the city that lead down to an entirely different realm, a great chasm.
>Players decide to descend to investigate. Didn't even have to push them.

The game has themes about 'the weight of knowledge' and 'insatiable human curiosity' and they didn't even ask, they had to KNOW what was down there.

Pic related, city map I made.
>cont.

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>>85344676
>cont.
>Once the players began descending, things started out pretty simple.
>I'll go through each layer I made for the lore.

>The Acadian Warrens
>There was a pile of trash in the first level, but the "trash" was from a few decades in the future rather than the past.
>They'd encountered this layer before properly entering the Abyss. When climbing back out they felt nausea and fatigue.

>Adumbral Labyrinth...
>They had a few random encounters here. The perpetual stormclouds in the chasm keep people away from the center.
>Camped here and found strange corroded devices from the distant future and religious symbols.
>Some civilization that'll arise in a few hundred years from now.
>ascending from this level requires a sanity check and cause loss of 1d10 sanity.

>The Bastille of the Last Lord
>A large number of mummified humanoid figures worshiping a single idol.
>A man, still alive somehow on some ancient throne.
>The players explore the Bastille and can see the glow of the Kaleidoscopic Lantern far below. It hangs on a great chain from beneath the Bastille.
>The Bastille marks the last point where humanity, in its present form, continues to survive.
>The Lantern is how long the marks of our civilization will last on the Universe
>Ascending from this level requires a sanity check and can result in the loss of 2d10 sanity.

>Beneath the Bastille is the Hypnotic Forest and Eurdite Watchtower.
>The forest is a a strange realm where humanity ceased to exist. Bizarre beings evolved from the remnants of our civilization.
>There are strange creatures here that await the death of the sun.
>Dangerous ecology and a forest hanging from the ceiling of the great cavern.
>The Eurdite watchtower was made long ago by delvers coming down from the city above.
>Ascending from this level requires a sanity check but failure results in a "minor" mutation.

>cont.

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>>85344793
>the Tartarus Steppe
>This is a region representing the death of the solar system as the sun warms and burns out
>It is a dangerous region where beings roam out from the city of Dis below
>Players have to carefully navigate boiling hotprings and weird encounters taking place here.
>Various entities that survive the end of our solar system can be found in the Steppe
>ascending from this level causes a sanity check where characters can lose 1d10 sanity or receive a minor mutation.

>The City of Dis
>This region is a place of "the true immortals" inhuman beings that survive to the furthest reaches of the age of stars in the Universe.
>To the creatures here, the Lantern is the last red dwarf in the galaxy slowly burning out
>It is a place of contracts and agreements
>alien beings fight over scarce resources
>Players have extended session here navigating the complex politics.
>After a fair amount of favor swapping, the players gain access to the Central Corridor down through which they can continue
>the "city of Dis" is a part of the Tartarus Steppe layer, so creatures within are free to range out into the steppe without incurring the penalties of 'ascending'.

>The Fungal Forest
>After the last stars burn out, the universe begins to decay into entropy. This is represented by the fungal forest.
>There are a few small pockets of life hanging on.
>The players had an encounter with "mushroom people" here.
>The Shining cove was somewhere they could finally rest, though it's technically in the NEXT level, not this one.
>Ascending from this level causes one "major" mutation with a failed sanity check

>The Shining Cove
>A cavern where the water glows blue and where travelers can rest.
>Also a place where they are faced with a choice: try to navigate underwater through the shining pool, or go backup to the Fungal Forest to continue down.
>The players went back up, one lost their face, and another player turned into an inhuman form.

>cont.

>>85344793
>>85344676

Sounds cool as fuck m8, very effective use of lovecraftian tropes

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>>85344890
>At this point my players, having already descended to the depths of The Abyss asked the perfectly reasonable question "wtf are we doing going down here?"
>This was an interesting conversation as they tried to justify their previous behavior, their curiosity, and their "mission".
>The original "mission" was simply "find where these artifacts are coming from and put a stop to it." and now they're more than halfway down the crack of hell.
>Human curiosity and desire for inappropriate knowledge.
>They justified continuing, butI think a good part of it was just sunk-cost fallacy. The rest was that they really wanted to see what was at the bottom.

>The prismatic Maw
>This region reflects the crystallization of reality at the end of time
>Strange entities survive here, low-entropy structures that do not express "reality" as biological creatures do
>Eternity in the blink of an eye and structures that reflect future and past at once.
>No one else has made it past this point
>ascending causes a major mutation and the loss of 1d10 sanity on a failed sanity check.
>Simple navigation requires a sanity check

>The Crystal Forest and the Shore of the midnight sea.
>So far in the future that even immortal inhuman beings barely grown eventually congealing to a flat lake seemingly made of glass. This is the end, the true end.
>everything past the glass edge of reality is "not" in a literal sense.
>here at the bottom the players find the Floating Inn, a small place for guests.
>Strange inhuman shimmerings in reality congregate here to celebrate teh end of everything.
>In the corner are three humans, soviet scientists, who look very out of place.
>This whole thing was created by accident, and the scientists seem to have long ago lost their heads.
>Eventually the players get through to the scientists and find out this was all a physics experiment to see the future. Instead, something in the eternal future reached back to them.
>cont.

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>>85344975
>The future-reality reaching back to the present isn't really a "place" or a "time" as we understand them.
>The only point of contact with this not-thing ist the base of the Mad Maelstrom. From which there is no returning.
>One player still has a satchel explosive and so descends the maelstrom alone.
>At this point the players are aware of the temporal nature of the abyss. How they're reaching the very edge of future-reality here
>there is nothing after this.
>Finally a single player reaches the point in the maelstrom where the glassy walls have swelled upwards on all sides, sets the charge and drops it to detonate in the eternal future.

>The rift was retroactively erased from existence, and every one present ceases to ever have been as the connection is lost.
>The one player brave enough to enter the maelstrom is catapulted forward in time past the end of eternity, he shrugs off his mortal coil and emerges as something "new".
>He's always been this way, he realizes, and is unsure whether this eternity he lives in existed "before" or "after" what just happened.
>Eventually he decides that concepts like "before" and "after" are silly, and wanders off as one of few great "elder ones" in a universe that doesn't exist yet.
>Every one else evaporates
>I end the campaign with this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
>as a GM i am left with the most ringing endorsement I've ever heard from a player who was unsatisfied with the ending:

"I wanted to play call of c'thulhu, not go home with an existential crisis!"

>my work here is done.

>>85344895
Thanks, any one who wants to use this campaign, go for it.

>>85344793
and
>>85344676

are images I custom-made for the campaign, so feel free to use them.

>>85345052
How did the players figure out the whole deeper u go the farther in the future the pit is aspect?

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>>85345150
It was made pretty obvious at the beginning on the first layer and at the end when they spoke to the scientists.There was some discussion about it halfway through the descent in the city of Dis.

There was no "big reveal" moment in the campaign, it's more that each player slowly realized over time "oh yeah, of course this is a metaphor for going forward in time, that makes sense."

It was never a 'secret' but it wasn't ever really specified as something immediately important either. It was just "the way things are".

>>85345219
I see. Was it ever revealed if the timeflow on the surface was different than in the pit? As in, if for some reason or another, the players had decided to turn around and climb back from the pit would they have found themselves in the same time period they were in when they decided to descend?

>>85345329
The one time they went in and came back up the time flow on the surface hadn't changed. Going in and out of the abyss changed their perspective, but not the rate at which time flowed for them. I figure it's complex enough with a take on Darkest Dungeon in the city and Made in Abyss below. No need to add more complications.

>>85344676
>>85344793
>>85344890
>>85344975
>>85345052
Man, I wish I had a gm like you. Hell, I wish I was half as good a gm as you.

>>85344676
>>85344793
>>85344890
>>85344975
>>85345052

Bravo, very spooky

>>85344676
>>85344793
>>85344890
>>85344975
>>85345052
That sounds sick, gratz.
Mind if I ask how your players interact with the various layers - as, what did the denizens want from the players? What did they talk about? Creating meaningful interactions with denizens of the bottom layers sound hard.

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>>85339814
Thing about Riku is she's probably operating according to whatever the relic that revived her told her to do. The only other thing revived by it also attempted to immediately jump into the Abyss.

As for OPs question, it could work. The issue is MiA is pretty focused. If you strip away the grotesque designs, whistle system, and vaguely ominous mystery revovling around the nature of the Abyss and the cycle and plague, you're sort of just left with a high lethality dungeon filled with magical items that gives zero shits about logic or reason in its environments.

>Upside forest?
Cool
>Field of flowers?
Put it in.
>Mushroom forest?
Yes, please.
>Polar research station?
Of course
>Underground ocean inhabited by zombie fish?
Makes sense
>Ancient, lost metropolis?
Gotta have one of those

I don't ever really stop and ask about anything off the main island.

>>85355141
>anything off the main island.
I think dragging some of those politics into the story could really spice it up.

You're right is technically a pretty standard dungeon crawl, just more outdoorsy, but as with a lot of things that strike a bit of popularity, its in the execution and aesthetics more than just the bare facts.
Specifically for MiA's popularity, I think it stems at least half from Tsukushi's art, and the rest comes partially from what is explicitly laid out about the setting, and more than that, what ISN'T explicitly said. There's a lot of things we don't know or understand about the Abyss, which makes the mystery murder hole a place we want to know more about. But just as much, the life and daily grind of the delvers is interesting in and of itself, and yet we get very few details on that. And as I said, the world outside has just the barest hints about it, but its enough to be interesting and set up plot hooks and ideas.

I had an idea where players are basically bonded criminals. Delving in the abyss to pay off their criminal record on behalf of a specific country. As non-citizens of Oorth they need that outside sponsorship to delve legally, and so require a steady stream of stuff to send home. But Oorth itself takes a cut. So its a balancing act of giving your country what they want to keep up your sponsorship, giving Oorth their cut, or trying to smuggle shit under their noses, and keeping what you can in order to make yourselves live longer or be more profitable. On top of this of course their rival groups and "bandits" working against you as well.
Is any of that canon? Nope. But it /fits/ as something that seems reasonable, and thats what makes the setting malleable enough for a game.

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>violate the NAP
>Get torn to bits

Such is life in the abyss

>>85353925
That cheeky belt buckle really sells the "I didn't have superpowers when I woke up this morning" vibe.

>>85345052
what mutation chart did you use?

>>85293565
The secret of the Abyss is 'sexualy themed child-abuse'
Does it even work as a setting if all character are adults ?

>>85357867
With sounds
https://files.catbox.moe/pgz7k4.webm

>>85358673
You can twist the premise and make characters perpetrators rather than victims.
Also it's not really "sexually themed", showing a fair bit of skin, especially now in the summer, is not inherently sexual.

>>85293565
Yeah... it's pretty explicitly a dungeon crawl where adventurers explore a subterranean labyrinth for the treasures within.
I always wonder at these posts that go "Wow, wouldn't this be a perfect prompt for a game?! What do we need to do to make it happen?!" when this really is one of the mainstays of the RPG world. It's like if someone posted a sick rift and said "Woah, we need to make a genre of music like this!" when you've just exemplified metal.

>>85360341
I have been playing tabletop RPGs for a little over 9 years now.
I've played tons of systems, I played with many many different groups, and I've only ever come close to a stood up dungeon crawl once.

Just because something is in a salad part of the genre, doesn't mean it's easy to find groups that go with it.

>>85356085
I always got the impression that Oorth is pretty mercenary/independent with the whole Delver thing, and it seems to me that Oorth probably benefits from keeping the national powers out however they can so that Oorth alone has a monopoly over the relics coming out of the Abyss. It so happens that the Abyss is in the ass-end of nowhere and filled to the brim with hard as nails madmen with more weapons than sense so force projection is very difficult and subjugating the island would be a costly endeavor for anyone.

I picture Oorth's political machine working more like a large organized crime family than a typical city government. The de-facto officials are running off connections, personal weight, and their own enforcers under an agreement of mutual cooperation to keep national interests at arm's reach so they can split the pot amongst themselves. Very little codified law, a very extensive web of favors and agreements. Government keeps things stable, keeps the peace, keeps the delvers happy, and does its best to keep themselves as neutral ground between foreign political interests.

In a setup like this you could keep the debt mechanic intact pretty easily; the PCs owe a boatload of loan/gambling debt to someone with powerful connections and if they don't pay up then his friends (who are rich enough to have access to several dangerous artifacts) are going to come collect.

The hiccup is that we don't see many weaponised artifacts outside of the ones used by delvers themselves, although I guess it isn't impossible for a shady guy to have powerful friends that also happen to be black whistles or something.

>>85293749
Music hits me l, so hard!
Makea me say, "OH MY LORD"!
"Thank you for blessing me with a mind to rhyme and two hot feet"
It feels good!

Reminder that following this manga or the anime even will be a series of hiatuses and that it will be a long ass wait between arcs. Manga writer is an exceptional otaku basement dweller.

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Am I late to the party? I was running an extensive (german) Made in Abyss group on Roll 20 for a little over a month and multiple sessions. It was quite fun and worked really well. My base for the gameplay was the year-zero engine, to be precise, I mostly copied from Alien-RPG and removed a lot of the Sci-Fi elements and mixed in Abyss-elements.

Take a look at the screen, it's not beautiful but it worked how it should. I chose Alien RPG as a base because of the dramatic inter-character dynamics and how Stress and Panic can influence the characters out of the players control. It added tension to the horrifying situations of the Abyss and made them always appear deadly. It also is rules light yet comes with enough build variety, fast deadly combat and emulates permanent and critical injuries on top of having survival mechanics like dehydration, hunger, freezing and so on. I knew that a good MiA story builds on the exposition, the grounding in the world around the characters and their life in Orth. You have to let them experience the amazing world building of the Abyss, not make them busy with bog standard quests and dungeon crawls. All of my players started as orphan children in Orth and had some city adventures that thematized the Abyss on a side note. They'd deal with a rival gang from the slums at the bottom of the city. They'd experience harsh and cruel training in the orphanage that was preparing them to dive for artefacts. They'd go to the markets and scrap whatever they saved up for equipment and candy and do kid things. This original light-heartedness would be my contrast to the later life-or-death situations of the Abyss and give them memories of a "good time" they gave up on, the left behind.

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>>85363141
I mostly used scenery from the anime as backdrops which gave everyone a nice cinema in their head for what to expect.

The red line of the story was they they were "bell" ranked shortly before a trial or test to get their red whistle. Which included them diving a few hundred meters into the Abyss and find any artefact to bring back. They'd experience the world first and foremost as the went down for the first time, the alien plant life and fauna. They'd find the strange stone huts that look like trees, the praying skeletons, the dangers of diving into a cloud cover that made mountains look like floating islands. Eventually running almost out of time without having found any artefacts yet. Forcing them to look deeper than they were originally allowed to go. I wanted to give them the right mindset that the Abyss hosts great rewards for those that dare search deeper. They descended further and with the sun slowly setting the wonderful colourful first layer around them changed into a hostile environment. Suddenly they found themselves confronted with the wildlife that hunted in the dark. They went into tight tunnels barely enough for a child to squeeze through lying flat on the back, sandwiched between thousands of tons of rock. Stress rising. Hitting poisonous spider nests, almost falling from the moss covered bridges only to find... a strange tower in the distance. Praying skeletons scattered around. A greyish orb, a compass in glass sitting on a podest - too perfect to be true. But they were kids and this was their card for the red whistle so they went ahead and grabbed it.

Now this might sound weird, but hear me out. I had to give them a reason to leave their live in Orth behind, to have them make a sacrifice and send them into a crazy delve down the flesh hole.

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>>85363244
A trap, obviously having them fall down a thin cover of rotten veins that covered the floor into a lightless basement. A cloaked figure with an obsidian coloured "display" on his mechanical head was the last thing they see before losing consciousness. Only to dream of inhuman procedures, pictures of their ribcages bending outwards, knifes slashing into their soft chests. They awake with a yelp in utter silence - missing even their heartbeats. Dim pain where they all shared that dream of the weird medical procedures only for them to find a strange artefact, an obsidian glass where their hearts should be. Instead of just finding the artefact, they all turned into one and on top; they made contact with a mysterious dweller of the deep.

The artefacts that were implanted into them were slowly losing the energy that all kept them alive at the surface. With the strange glowing runes on the obsidian glass disappearing into nothingness so they all knew that their remaining time on this strange world was coming to an end unless they could figure out what that strange figure was - what it did to them and how to recover new power for fading artefacts.

So they had to sacrifice their friends on the surface, their home they spend having little child adventures, their ambitions to become proper cave raiders and hastily get down that god damn hole or die trying.

It captured that exact feeling you got from reading the Manga. It gave you that wonderful feeling of adventure and I'm truly happy I was allowed to GM this for my group.

>>85363141
>>85363244
>>85363276
Good setup to make them go deeper. A tiiny bit contrived, but most RPGs start with a bit of contrivance anyway. The "call to adventure" will always hit the protagonists after all.

Interested to see you used the Alien RPG mechanics. How did you reverse engineer the classes? Or was everyone the Child class? I've often thought about running an MiA game, and I really like the Alien RPG system, but I would never have thought to try running MiA in it.

>>85363643
I removed the need for classes, there are non in the game. It loses just a tiny bit of complexity but in exchange everyone can chose from a list of talents and attributes I derived from the original Alien RPG with a few new ones and a few rewritten to work in a non-scifi universe.

For starting gear I let them earn money from the early sessions slice of life / introduction things. They then used that to buy gear for their red whistle initiation. This gave their possessions a more personal note and felt less gamey and less restrictive.

>>85361218
when you know you're down
Super-dope homeboy from the old town....

>>85357867
>>85359303

That scene made me feel surprisingly bad for maa

>>85371305
She's a retarded baby that gets summarily evicirated for squishing a funny looking hamster. Feeling bad for her is natural.

>>85363741
based

>>85357867
what the fuck is going on here

>>85374913
lynching

Why did they have to ruin Srajo the Mysterious .......

Fuck

>>85374960
Seriously. The uber plague doctor is now just another lolgurl. Not very mysterious.

>>85374913
The pink think hurt Riko's pet, the village's magic punished it.

>>85374913
>Everything in the Narahate village has 'value.'
>You can buy and sell everything.
>Literally everyhing. Services, rocks, your parts. Everything.
>Maa (the pink thing) accidentally hurts Riko's pet.
>Maa has harmed the value of something she doesn't own.
>Maa owes Riko restitution.
>Riko is asked what the value of the harm to her pet is but can't easily quantify a value
>unqunatifiable = a lot
>as mentioned earlier, value includes pieces of your body
>pretty much everying Maa keeps is taken, then she is partially skinned alive and one of her arms is removed
Notably, Maa did survive this. Her and Riko made up later, IIRC.

>>85375176
How is some random Japanese guy so familar with the idea of AnCap utopia?

>>85359303
The music that starts when the ballancing begins is great.

>>85310635
It's an allegory for how irreparably fucked up you get the deeper you go into the immoral rabbit holes he got stuck in, and how you can never go back to being human after going down them. There's a village of ex-people trading fetishes for fuck's sake.

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>>85310635
it happens more often than you think

>>85357867
>>85371305
>>85375035
>>85375176
This was retarded because the police simply take your word on the valuation of your shit, there's no reason why everyone wouldn't always lie and claim all their stuff is priceless, where are the checks and balances

>>85317052
The manga art is kind of shit, the anime salvages it like crazy, especially the environments

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>>85375511
It's explained later in the story that the value isn't based on the statements of the denizens of the village, but the desires of their hearts/souls. As in, the town itself can see the minds/souls of the people/hollows in it, and knows what they actually value and hold in high regard. So "lying" about the value of a thing only really works if you actually believe your own lies wholly.

>>85374960
>>85375009
Hopefully Wakuna is cooler.

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>>85375488
well played anon