Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra: World Conquest Starts with the Civilization of Ruin - Ch. 31 - Curtain

[Agyl]

We are so back

 

[Shinigamisama]

Oh ho. Trouble is brewing and it's high time for vengeance.
Who's Verdel again? Is the dead paladin the same one Verdel killed (Thomas)? If so, is that Takuto pretending to be whoever this Verdel guy is then swaps into him?

 

[Qwormuli]

This arc was a proper mystery lol, even tho you can kinda see who did it

Spoiler: BIG spoiler, don't cry if you got spoil cause this is how he won in the end

Calling out the GM for doing bullshit is honestly, biggest brain move lmao

Spoiler

And not just calling out the bullshit, but by metagaming the contextually blind hugbox ruleset of the TRPG edition he sleuthed out by the opponent's actions. Literally using (badly implemented) sportsmanlike rules in unsporting fashion to nail the bastard for doing the same. RAI cries,when RAW strikes.

 

[WhimsiCat]

Hmm did he do something like create 2 "characters", make them both Paladins, and give them both the name "Unknown"? Then proceeds to play mind games, by having one kill the other; then, swap the dead body with the other paladin that got killed, just to completely screw with any attempt to properly analyze the situation, via divination?

I think the body they found was 'Verdel's, hence why the killer ('Verdel') and the body ('Verdel') are the same.

And whatever thing Takuto made 'Verdel' out of was unidentifiable by the tabletop RPG system, thus 'unknown'

Basically he MissingNo the DnD system.

 

[Qwormuli]

People were so mad when I called the MC evil - seems I was right

Those are the people who perpetrated an extralegal assassination against a neutral(?) country due to religious dogma. They started a war (in a really shifty way) without a declaration and now their military targets are under military threat in a war they started.

Remind me again what was the horribly evil part of the killing in this chapter? Takuto might be a few pieces short off a set and is not above some fairly fucked up strategies, but nothing in this chapter was overtly in any way near that.

 

[Magnico]

This arc was a proper mystery lol, even tho you can kinda see who did it

Spoiler: BIG spoiler, don't cry if you got spoil cause this is how he won in the end

Calling out the GM for doing bullshit is honestly, biggest brain move lmao

I feel so tempted to open it jajaja

 

[ScryedParadox]

As someone who has played a lot of tabletop RPGs, both as a player and as a Dungeon Master/Game Master/Storyteller (whichever terminology you use depending on the system you're accustomed to, whether it's D&D, Pathfinder, Legends, World of Darkness, Exalted, Call of Cthulhu, etc.)

The player character rolling a critical success and being told "No, it's a secret" by the game master is very on point.

Stop relying on your dice roll and start working for it. Just because you can roll a high success doesn't mean you can manifest an answer because you literally do not have any information available to you that should allow you to deduce something out of it with your intelligence, wisdom, perception or whatever equivalent stat you're using.

And in this case, if this was a prayer divination roll. Well, the game master has all the rights to screw with you for the sake of the story, or for counter rolls you have no idea about, or for an unspecified check difficulty or other countering abilities you may not be aware of. Sure, she borrowed the authority of the game master to alter the roll, but she's not the actual "game master" who is narrating the story here.

Basically. Get BTFO, your dice rolls have no power here.

 

[LuckyNChance]

The animes visuals weren't the greatest, but it was enough to get me interested in the manga and light novel. So I'd call it a success.

 

[rspkers]

I was there, 3000 years ago.

Edit: in these past 6 moths i've read all of Mynoghra Novels, they are pretty good, manga has its charm as well, i like the character design, anime felt dull.

Man I was so disappointed by the anime. Completely souless and felt like every episode dragged on without any effort put into it. Direction felt lazy and boring. Like they were trying to stretch every scene to tell as little of a story visually as possible so they didn't have to animate anything else. I can't explain it. Dull is the right word. I went in with it being the anime I was most looking forward to watching amongst my lineup of current seasons stuff. By episode 3 it was my least.

 

[Qwormuli]

As someone who has played a lot of tabletop RPGs, both as a player and as a Dungeon Master/Game Master/Storyteller (whichever terminology you use depending on the system you're accustomed to, whether it's D&D, Pathfinder, Legends, World of Darkness, Exalted, Call of Cthulhu, etc.)

The player character rolling a critical success and being told "No, it's a secret" by the game master is very on point.

Stop relying on your dice roll and start working for it. Just because you can roll a high success doesn't mean you can manifest an answer because you literally do not have any information available to you that should allow you to deduce something out of it with your intelligence, wisdom, perception or whatever equivalent stat you're using.

And in this case, if this was a prayer divination roll. Well, the game master has all the rights to screw with you for the sake of the story, or for counter rolls you have no idea about, or for an unspecified check difficulty or other countering abilities you may not be aware of. Sure, she borrowed the authority of the game master to alter the roll, but she's not the actual "game master" who is narrating the story here.

Basically. Get BTFO, your dice rolls have no power here.

In general I agree with you: There's a good reason it's called roleplaying, not rollplaying and people tend to memefy dice rolls way too much. But I feel it's important to note for this specific case that large part of why that roll fudging succeeds all the time here is that the PC and the GM are allied and the GM has no qualms about abusing his power. Remember that the GM isn't working for some narrative or campaign, but to win this game, so preserving a mystery for good storytelling isn't something he probably would want to do.

Spoiler: From here on out, stuff might contain some as of now unrevealed info

The GM is as befuddled as her at how his little act cheatery refused to work. He's in a massive position of power from some perspectives, but doesn't have to mean that he's all that good either as a player or GM or that he's omnipotent or even that he's the effective god of the entire setting. There are many sets of rules intersecting here and he's in the judge's seat only for one of those.

 

[UncleKaos]

I mean dude is the King of the country of demise were all citzens are evil aligned so.... Yeah, he is evil just not stereotypical "want to cause chaos and misery" evil.

Yeah the resume of the manga even says "evil god."

 

[ScryedParadox]

In general I agree with you: There's a good reason it's called roleplaying, not rollplaying and people tend to memefy dice rolls way too much. But I feel it's important to note for this specific case that large part of why that roll fudging succeeds all the time here is that the PC and the GM are allied and the GM has no qualms about abusing his power. Remember that the GM isn't working for some narrative or campaign, but to win this game, so preserving a mystery for good storytelling isn't something he probably would want to do.

Spoiler: From here on out, stuff might contain some as of now unrevealed info

The GM is as befuddled as her at how his little act cheatery refused to work. He's in a massive position of power from some perspectives, but doesn't have to mean that he's all that good either as a player or GM or that he's omnipotent or even that he's the effective god of the entire setting. There are many sets of rules intersecting here and he's in the judge's seat only for one of those.

Well, I saw someone else's post about this and wanted to note that obviously our MC here is also making clear use of his knowledge of the fact that his opponent is under a tabletop RPG system, but also his past experience of what happens with JRPG crosses with RTS and how the rules intersect.

Like for example, his combat units still behaved like his RTS combat units, which decimated the RPG units completely ignoring how they function based on the typical JRPG level system and etc. While also the forced cutscenes of JRPGs fully overwrote the RTS system.

You can extrapolate some ideas from that, and knowing how riddled with exploits that a tabletop RPG system is, paired with the complications of other alternate game systems that can override results by the sheer force of their own systems just means that if you can figure out a blind spot in the tabletop RPG system that you can overwrite with your own system. Then you're in absolute control.

I avoided the spoilers here for the most part as I have no clear idea what exactly the MC is doing to get the results he wants here. And since I have no clue of the ruleset of the in-universe in-story tabletop RPG system, I also have no clue what gap or rule lawyering he's using.

And of course this is just based on the conflicting game systems and the players here. Nevermind any entity or force above all of them.

 

[sailor-erida]

RTS mechanism

Just want to remind, he is not from RTS (real time strategy). He is from weird nonsensical TBS (turn based strategy), sort of fantasy Civilization, but with heroes like in HoMM.

 

[ScryedParadox]

Yeah the resume of the manga even says "evil god."

Ehh. Don't put too much weight on the title and whatnot. Usually that's just the starting premise, or it's in context of the story and stuff like that. In this case it's because he is technically evil aligned in the in-universe game. But it doesn't mean he absolutely is evil.

Pardon the wall of text, it's not exactly aimed at you, but rather aimed at the idea you brought forward.

Similar to how many manga out there are about the Villainess, but many of these so called Villainess are either just dorks or heroines.

Hell, you could have a story about a group called the Anti-BadGuys Heroes Squad, and it would be a story about a bunch of psychopaths going around in a psychological horror gore tag seinen manga about a vile group of people calling themselves the anti-BadGuys Heroes, but all they're doing is killing people and making everyone's lives worse.

Actually this last one I can provide a direct example. There's a horror manga about a superhero going around giving other regular people superhero powers which always turns horrific, called Ally of Justice Seigidar

https://mangadex.org/title/9d9740b9-1e51-4c1b-9338-ca4fa3338b8d/seigi-no-mikata-seigidar

...Went on a bit of a tangent on real life examples too, but that can be heavy for some to read so I'm just hiding it in a spoiler.

Spoiler: Feel free to not click on this and not read any of this stuff

Proper context matters, looking at the actual action and elements matters. This applies both to stories and to real life. Like for example, if you didn't know any better you would think that PETA is a good organization, but they've been known to kidnap pets and euthanize them, they've been found with freezers full of dead animals too and when you dig into them, they seem more interested in fund raising for themselves and their executives.
Or Disney, that calls itself the most magical place on earth, but also somehow had Disney park employees involved in child smuggling criminal activity last year, but that story was also quickly pushed out of the air waves and the general media landscape because Disney is a happy family company that gives you magical entertainment, ignore that they're the reason why copyright laws are so draconian.
Or Nintendo and their long history of anti-consumer practices who are always extremely actively letigious and against their own fanbase and fan communities, cracking down on creators, fan created events and most recently through the Pokemon company that they pseudo-own, flooded the patent offices with basic gameplay features such as seeing an outline of your character through an obstacle in game, that they might as well be trying to say to every other game developers in the world that they own the rights to all games and every developers in the world needs to pay their patent fees, in a thinly veiled threat to all indie developers that they need to know their place.

I was about to devolve into more depressing and perturbing discussions and more polarizing discussions, but then things would blow up.
Even touching on the generally agreed upon that the above three organization has tendencies that are commonly agreed upon to be evil, you also still have a ton of rallying supporters for those organizations that will defend them tooth and nail against any criticism.

So, to round it back to the original point, just because a story title suggests the story is about someone evil doesn't mean they're evil. Just because a story title suggests the story is about someone good doesn't mean that theyr'e good.

 

[ScryedParadox]

Just want to remind, he is not from RTS (real time strategy). He is from weird nonsensical TBS (turn based strategy), sort of fantasy Civilization, but with heroes like in HoMM.

Oh... Had to double check chapter 1, but yeah you're right.

I guess it's just been so long, and the mechanics tends to look like things such as zerg rushing that my brain and likely many others just switched it over in our head to RTS.

The game in the manga is described as a "Country Management Simulation" game that's turn based, and has an online leaderboard/ranking system.

Thinking further on it, I guess this is one of those 4X games (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate)
Here's an example of a 4X game in a comical review in case someone wants a more tangible idea:

Thanks for the reminder.

 

[AfroedMangareader]

Finally getting to see this scene visually is so pleasing. I can't wait for the later scenes to come. >

 

[browniesan]

takuto really be playing amongus this time

 

[Friendly-Sentence710]

Where is Atou? I want to be sure that Best (slime)Girl is OK

I hope Gremlin Lolita Witch joins the harem Evil God's Army.

 

[rluka]

He got murdered in broad daylight by a brainwashed trusted aide. He can be Lawful Good and murdering back his assailants would still be a valid crashout.

cmiiw, his game's alignment system is for calculation when interacting with other elements also with alignments.
Such as getting buff/nerf depending on area of control, or blocking diplomatic attempts (such as how “good” alignment characters automatically fear or hate them for no reason).
Rather than actually reflecting on their nature, at least outside how the players want to role play that.

 

[godsuzo]

Well good chapter see you guys next year same time for chapter 32