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Holy poo poo, that's so much cooler than porting a fraction of Vampire clans and calling it parity. I also liked the throwaway line where being a government agency meant budget constraints. (Instead of 90's oWoD when The Government had all the money everywhere and unlimited access to everything.)
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Feb 13, 2013 04:42
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Reene posted:I'm not sure that would work. An injury is arguably damage to a living pattern; even if you make the "corpse" look pristine again, the damage will persist. I think it's kinda clever and doesn't really upset game balance. I wouldn't let it heal agg, but I would let it downgrade lethal to bashing.
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Feb 13, 2013 04:47
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Ferrinus posted:Tell me how it works out! That is just the key difference behind a whole host of changes! The primary cynicism is just the change from Magic being an essential Truth and the practice of Magic containing the possibility of essential Truth. This is because there's no Lie ('gently caress the masquerade, we're tired of this cliche' and 'we just want to play rear end in a top hat wizards' was basically the impetus behind the game); magic has been entirely 'mundane' for as long as human history has been recorded. Powerful wizards have always been very rare (as Awakening is not generally an awakening, and doesn't necessitate any sort of drive for self-improvement) and look on things as pointless or trivial. Most wizards, like most people, have always been just interested enough to learn whatever helps them live comfortably. Pretty much anything you can do with modest amounts of magic are doable more easily without magic (even mind control is pretty hard to make more reliable than just being in charge of your own cult or a competent politician) after all. This has led to a whole host of knock-on effects (the Orders do still exist in changed forms because the reasons for their existence are missing or different; the Guardians of the Veil are concerned with limiting the spread of and removing Paradox, for instance) all stemming from that core change. Which isn't to say there are no Exarchs, no Abyss and no threats. The mundanity of magic is the Lie of this setting. Stripped of mysticism and secrecy, mere knowledge and practice of magic is not a vehicle of Truth. Exposed to the mundane world it becomes a servant to capitalism and nationalism and all the other weapons of the Exarchs. While it is still possible for individuals (such as the PCs) to attempt to reach transcendental understanding, the default state of wizards is subject to it all (which is why powerful wizards, those with more than a tiny amount of Gnosis, are so rare and the ones who achieve it are generally selfish, disinterested or Seers). That's why it's a much more cynical setting; because it denies the central optimism that magic is ceteris paribus a force of enlightenment. Enlightenment is difficult and must be sought without even the certainty that it is a concept that exists to be sought. Not that I expect this to be central to the chronicle (unless it goes for a long time), given that the reason behind it was mostly just to make a fun world for the players to wizard around in that wasn't buried in a congealed mass of White Wolf. If they were interested in the themes of the core game I obviously wouldn't be stomping on it so hard. atelier morgan fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Feb 13, 2013 |
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Feb 13, 2013 05:52
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moths posted:Holy poo poo, that's so much cooler than porting a fraction of Vampire clans and calling it parity. In Compacts and Conspiracies TF:V, they outline that VALKARYE gets in the budget $875K a year. How is that supposed to fund any kind of monster hunting clandestine agency? Simply: it doesn't. How they answer that question is kinda jarring and hilariously simple, but actually works in a really cynical way. Enough to really flavour a conspiracy-level Hunter game too. It's Vampires. I had the idea of having a bunch of press-ganged Hunters who're US soldiers in Iraq hunting down Interstitial Terrain and having to fight back what's there, or be charged with war crimes. Good luck! blindidiotgod fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Feb 13, 2013 |
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Feb 13, 2013 06:12
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That sounds like it would be a great take on it. Interstitial Terrain seems like it would make such a great RPG element. No GM can describe everything, and it's a monster that lives in the schrodinger box grey area that isn't defined. TFV makes more sense in the context of that spoiler, and now I need to go read Compacts and Conspiracies...
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Feb 13, 2013 15:40
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blindidiotgod posted:In Compacts and Conspiracies TF:V, they outline that VALKARYE gets in the budget $875K a year. How is that supposed to fund any kind of monster hunting clandestine agency? Simply: it doesn't. I wasn't satisfied by that reveal, myself. It feels like too much of a callback to the oWoD standby of "vampires run everything," and I liked that the nWoD posits a world where no, they really don't have that kind of conspiratorial power, they're too fractious and hampered by the banes to achieve that level of collective secret power. I did like a spin on it which I seem to recall came indirectly from spitballing way back earlier in the last version of this thread, though, making use of an element from another book. Compacts & Conspiracies effectively posits "what if the vampires own the President?" but the inverse struck me as more interesting, and this is the wording I think I got from the thread - "what if the President owns the vampires?" Or some of them, anyway. The Danse Macabre book has a vampire covenant of Sun-Walking Knights who are more like a mutually beneficial conspiracy of vampires and ghouls, where the ghouls control the blood flow and the vampires feed it back to them as vitae. The game I was in didn't get far enough to explore this, but that's who was going to be bankrolling VALKYRIE — vampire conspirators in hock to the government, feeding the task force information, illicit funds and undying age in return for protection from the government shield.
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Feb 13, 2013 17:09
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Changeling Chat: What's your favorite abuse of the Pledge rules? Me I'm a big fan of using them to gain access to the ridiculous Slasher merits for stupid-stackable murder abilities.
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Feb 14, 2013 00:51
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Speaking of Changeling, couldn't Clarity just be called Mundanity? As far as I can tell it's not about having a clear-eyed view of the world and your condition, it's a measure of how hard you work to pretend you're not a Changeling.
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Feb 14, 2013 13:51
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Pope Guilty posted:Speaking of Changeling, couldn't Clarity just be called Mundanity? As far as I can tell it's not about having a clear-eyed view of the world and your condition, it's a measure of how hard you work to pretend you're not a Changeling. How about... "Banality"?
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Feb 14, 2013 15:32
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:How about... "Banality"?
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Feb 14, 2013 16:36
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Gerund posted:Changeling Chat: A player wants to start a buisness, he works the pledge into the contract whereby the benefit for the workers is "bonus resources" while the changeling gets whatever. Now he has a buisness but doesn't actually need to pay his workers because the money comes from magical ghosts or whatever re: Clarity - Not entirely, the fact that you become more and more bound to your word at higher levels means you're going to be constantly aware that you're a changeling.
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Feb 14, 2013 17:12
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Little_wh0re posted:A player wants to start a buisness, he works the pledge into the contract whereby the benefit for the workers is "bonus resources" while the changeling gets whatever. Now he has a buisness but doesn't actually need to pay his workers because the money comes from magical ghosts or whatever I'm not sure how this is much of an abuse because without the magical ghosts, the business with a pledge is *exactly the same* as a normal business.
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Feb 14, 2013 17:31
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Well, it allows pretty broke people to somehow employ people, without actually needing money for themselves
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Feb 14, 2013 17:39
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And thus was born the true fae titled Captain of Industry.
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Feb 14, 2013 17:42
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Little_wh0re posted:Well, it allows pretty broke people to somehow employ people, without actually needing money for themselves Sounds like a normal small business except instead of a bank loan you have a magic one. Hope you don't get audited! Is there a 'income from mystical sources' box on business tax returns?
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Feb 14, 2013 17:48
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My absolute favorite thing in Changeling is the mind-shatteringly evil Arcadian monster who squirmed into the world of men with the fiendish plan of unleashing the terrors of capitalism upon the helpless populace, and then languished in pitiful obscurity running a lovely no-name restaurant somewhere because humans had been doing it for so much longer and so much more effectively.
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Feb 14, 2013 20:11
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Not that I mind, but nWoD sure is nakedly political sometimes.
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Feb 14, 2013 20:24
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Eh, it's nakedly political in the sense that it's pretty politically unexamined and shows its inherent biases freely, but then, so are most of the people who're likely to play it, so it's not exactly a fault.
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Feb 14, 2013 20:32
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I think this falls under the blanket of it being the World of Darkness and not the real world. WoD politics should be run as if every political attack ad were true.
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Feb 14, 2013 20:44
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Etherwind posted:Eh, it's nakedly political in the sense that it's pretty politically unexamined and shows its inherent biases freely, but then, so are most of the people who're likely to play it, so it's not exactly a fault. Listen, I'm sure you know what everyone's politics are with exactly as much authority as past fans who have declared that I supported the Khmer Rouge, was an anarcho-primitivist and to top it all off, a member of the Nation of Islam. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 14, 2013 21:08
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What if I've never declared those things with authority, but just hoped really hard (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 14, 2013 21:15
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Listen, I'm sure you know what everyone's politics are with exactly as much authority as past fans who have declared that I supported the Khmer Rouge, was an anarcho-primitivist and to top it all off, a member of the Nation of Islam. I broadly consider nWoD's politics and social commentary through the perspective of "Death of the Author", and while I know that's a figurative expression, your reply makes me wish it was at least partly literal commentary. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 14, 2013 21:31
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I, too, wish death upon my hated foe "MalcolmSheppard"
Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Feb 14, 2013 |
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Feb 14, 2013 22:05
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Uh, I didn't mean to cause chaos with my pledge chat guys.
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Feb 15, 2013 00:21
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So! Uh. What were we Old Mage. I realized that considering I got into WW stuff in the nineties, as well as marrying someone who adores oMage, I had never actually read anything from the line. Mostly because I'd met people who liked Mage (no offense, dear) and I've read posts from people who like Mage, or at least sperging about it, and that was pretty helpful in not wanting to go anywhere near it. So I went to the wrong side of the RPG bookshelf in our house and started reading Revised. It's pretty neat. It is very much a product of its time, and it's postmodernism.txt, but it's pretty neat. Mostly in the sense that a quarter of the way through I started planning out how I would completely re-write it, but honestly I consider that to be a good thing. An RPG book that isn't to my taste I'll just put down, but I appreciate ones that make me think "I can do something with this. Something terrible and awesome". I want to combine it with Demon. Because shut up, that's why. nWoD rules, of course. The two major things that struck me as needing a rework were the lack of morality (big "m" or little, your choice), and the Traditions. I'll start with the Traditions because the morality thing is a bit bigger. I'm well aware of the general consensus that WoD clans/Trads/&c. are nothing more than high school cliques writ large. Some books are more guilty of this than others. What I realized I really disliked about the Traditions as written was that a number were far too tied to geographic region rather than philosophical path. While I'm sure these groups are flushed out in their individual Tradition books, as a virgin reader working only with the core book, I didn't like how overly-identified certain groups were. Yes, obviously philosophies are products of particular geographic and socio-cultural circumstances. But ideally they wouldn't stay that way. My criteria for re-imagining these groups has become this: would a guy from Winnipeg or a gal from Lesu, New Ireland be just as likely to resonate with this particular philosophy? To be fair to the book, it shouldn't take much work at all to take any character concept and put them into any Tradition. To be less fair to the book as written, the Akashic Brother comes off as 'the Asian one' and less like the Tradition of Internal Focus on Mind and Body, the latter being much more preferable to me. For a game about transcending the trappings of reality and finding ones' own paradigm, the Traditions appear to be staid presentations of well-trod ideas. 'Scrapping the Traditions' sounds a bit harsh, but it is definitely going to be a process of finding out what archetype they're really selling and presenting that, rather than the idea filtered through a cultural lens. The question of morality arose when thinking about combining this with Demon. I loving love Demon. In Demon, there is a little bit of flavour text that hints that Lucifer, in his awesomeness, Awakened (Awoke?) the first Mages. This is fantastic. Suddenly, the Avatar has the potential to be the spark of divinity within humanity, the path of possibility of Ascendance that was the original path before the Edenic fall. This is right up my conceptual alley, except that grafting Mage and Demon together brings the sticky situation of morality. Though Demon is certainly not a game of objective, black-and-white Good and Evil, there are moral implications. Very profound ones, and mechanically represented ones. Tying this to a game where a Tradition espouses killing as a means of giving the "good death" would mean something is going to lose out. For my rewrite, moral relativism is the loser. It was intensely interesting to read the Paradox rules in this light. Use vulgar magic to explode a dude's head on a crowded street and you'll get Paradox. Succeed in casting coincidental magic to have that same dude hit by a truck and you will not face Paradox. Philosophical paradigms and cultural norms aside, this didn't sit well with me. It absolutely fits with magic as written; it does its job. Ascension is amoral. If we take the Avatar to be the fragment of the divine, as I would in this case, then Ascension should incorporate peril of falling. The Nephandi brings this into perspective for me. On one hand, we have subjective reality in the form of Awakened mages and their magic. On the other, we're presented with the Nephandi, who are described in no uncertain terms as Objectively Evil. Unfortunately, as written, this shouldn't fly. Yes, they want to corrupt and/or utterly destroy reality. But really, is that so wrong? Who are we to judge? If the Nephandi are Evil, then there is something that is good. I think that 'goodness', however loosely defined we wish to make it, should impact Mages. What I think would work would be adding a scale of Abyssal Resonance. Much like Torment, this would be accrued by being an rear end in a top hat. Rather than Humanity, which gives you a base of 7 from which to slide, it would be assumed the Mage begins at zero. (Yes, most Fallen start with three or four Torment; they're Demons, sucks to be them.) Accumulating Abyssal Resonance would mark one's fall. It would not limit power; you could have nine Arete and be King rear end in a top hat with nine Abyssal, but that tenth dot would complete your transformation into Nephandi. I prefer falling to be on the individual's shoulders, rather than the idea that current Nephandi spend their days trying to get Mages to try being a bad guy, c'mon, first time's free. Abyssal Resonance would also allow closer ties to the Demon concepts of the Earthbound and the cracks in the Abyss where even bigger assholes wait to be freed. This is all very much in pre-planning stages for me, but so far I've enjoyed playing with ideas. Considering the discussions that have come up in sharing this with my beleaguered husband, I don't expect this to fly very well. THE WHOLE POINT IS SUBJECTIVE REALITY, WHAT ARE YOU DOING. Something terrible and awesome, I hope. It's me. I'm the rear end in a top hat who writes way too much about Mage. gently caress.
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Feb 15, 2013 00:36
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Zeithos posted:I want to combine it with Demon. Because shut up, that's why. This is unironically the best reason to do anything in WoD, as either ST or player. I can't comment on oWoD much because I lacked the endurance to read much past the first chapter of MtAs but the whole Lucifer as a mythological stand-in for Prometheus is a pretty common and neat motif in fiction and it would be cool to see a setting come at it from that angle.
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Feb 15, 2013 03:21
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Reene posted:Lucifer as a mythological stand-in for Prometheus is a pretty common and neat motif in fiction and it would be cool to see a setting come at it from that angle. Funny thing. Waaaay back in the day I had an idea for an oMage homebrew that I never ran. It was basically this set up, with Lucy/Prometheus being a sort of johnny appleseed of magic, siring children with and teaching tribes and villages about magic. Prometheus' kids (cribbed from the Nephilim here) were the progenitors of all mages, who inherited their magic from generation to generation (I cribbed from werewolf birthrates and kin ratios here) I called the hack "children of Prometheus". I should try and find my notes, they're probably terrible/hilarious.
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Feb 15, 2013 03:30
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If I could dip my toe into the topic without needlessly insulting anyone, the writeups of the Ministries are conceived from a very left-wing perspective, which I enjoy. The sources of the world's oppression and evil in the setting are: Surveillance, Nationalism, Organized Religion, and the Military, with special runner-up Capitalism.
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Feb 15, 2013 03:58
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To be totally fair, they did throw in atheism and evopsych (reddit is a Seer conspiracy!).  But the underlying message there is that even the anti-oppression groups are still furthering Seer agendas and entrenching people further in the Lie, so in the end it's all the same.
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Feb 15, 2013 04:24
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There are a lot of bones thrown at the Right Wing as well, but they're a little more subtle. oWoD had True Faith (albeit in an agnostic way), gun culture is an essential part of any Mortals game, the Government is ineffective (at best) when the chips are down, and there really is a God (machine).
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Feb 15, 2013 04:56
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Yes, but from the God Machine Chronicle previews, the God Machine is almost certainly amoral, and if we're going to judge it based on its cultists, immoral. The fact that the stand-in for God has evil cultists alone is kind of a left wing idea. It manifests as a flesh computer thing! How similar/wholesome is that to the Judeo-Christian God? There really is a big undercurrent of individualism in WoD. I gather that's from its horror inspirations. Has there ever been a horror movie where there was a benevolent, effective government? Either the government is helpless against slashers and monsters, or it's creating those monsters to begin with (and occasionally both). In the end, it's always up to those good ol' small town guys and gals and a courageous farmer with a gun. Come to think of it, horror is one of the most conservative genres out there.
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Feb 15, 2013 07:01
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moths posted:There are a lot of bones thrown at the Right Wing as well, but they're a little more subtle. oWoD had True Faith (albeit in an agnostic way), gun culture is an essential part of any Mortals game, the Government is ineffective (at best) when the chips are down, and there really is a God (machine). Actually, TFV is pretty competent, just also a nightmare of government surveillance and paranoia.
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Feb 15, 2013 07:05
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Reene posted:This is unironically the best reason to do anything in WoD, as either ST or player. I think it provides another avenue to explore individualism and the struggle against collective, static reality without flying face-first into the ungodly morass that is cultural/moral/philosophical relativism. Lucifer-as-Prometheus, as you mentioned, is a pretty powerful archetype in his own right. Especially since you'd have the Fallen, static beings who represented the essential underpinnings of reality, and Mages, who are the scions of the potentiality of humanity. The Fallen are limited, but their original rebellion gave birth to the possibility of Free Will; Mages have Free Will, and are struggling to remember how to rebel. Error 404 posted:Funny thing. Waaaay back in the day I had an idea for an oMage homebrew that I never ran. It was basically this set up, with Lucy/Prometheus being a sort of johnny appleseed of magic, siring children with and teaching tribes and villages about magic. Prometheus' kids (cribbed from the Nephilim here) were the progenitors of all mages, who inherited their magic from generation to generation (I cribbed from werewolf birthrates and kin ratios here) I'd be interested to see what you'd scribbled up! My off-the-cuff is to be wary of making the Nephilim the explanation for Awakening as it would place a constraint on being a Mage, i.e., whether one was a descendant of the 'mighty men of old' or not. I'd like to turn Mage from a game of relativism to one of human universals, so that everyone should have the potential for Ascendance or falling. One thing I haven't sussed out yet is whether Mages' Avatar/Arete/Quintessence/magical ability thing would constitute Faith-capital-F for Demons. Magic is described in the core as requiring the users' will, faith, resolve, and other such synonyms. Would that be something noticable/accessible to a Fallen? Or would it be another mirror, where the Fallen have to inspire the Faith of others to engage the threads of reality, as opposed to Mages, who rely on an internal fount. It'd certainly be another sign pointing to the 'destiny' of mankind to eventually transcend the Angelic Host.
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Feb 15, 2013 07:30
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Individualism is less a horror thing and more a Western, Enlightenment thing.
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Feb 15, 2013 07:32
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nMage isn't the angry Left-Wing game of the nWoD. Sure, I'm an angry liberal in RL who likes to shout at the tv when my government act like Evil Priests in D&D, but nMage has way too much "you must be this special to join in" threaded through it. Where it's political, it the politics of looking at whether the incredibly fortunate see a duty to help others be as fortunate, ignore it completely, hold their hands, leave them to it after guving the, the opportunity, patronise them, do the American Dream thing and assume that it was because they were inherently better rather than lucky and anyone could do it if they applied themselves, or revel in it and toy with the little guy. It asks how you react to being a 1%er - your answer can be left wing or right wing, it doesn't care. The angry Left-Wng game of the nWoD is Mummy. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 08:52 on Feb 15, 2013 |
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Feb 15, 2013 08:50
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Are you a bad enough dude to awaken the sleeping giant of social justice and the working class?
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Feb 15, 2013 08:53
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How many dots in Mind does it take to unite the Proletariat?
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Feb 15, 2013 12:48
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Luminous Obscurity posted:How many dots in Mind does it take to unite the Proletariat? Trick question! As soon as the concept of the proletariat exists for you you have bought into the Lie.
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Feb 15, 2013 13:09
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Speaking of politics, I'm currently working on an Arcanum game set in mid-1963 in a fictional New England city (probably going to use Kingsport because the Call of Cthulhu Kingsport supplement owns bones). I am importing some elements of some of the Vigil groups into factions of the Arcanum: the Aegis Kai Doru fit in pretty much without alteration and gives a cool structure to the grail hunters, Null Mysteriis could be militantly clinging to science in an organization that's like "well, let's meditate about this in the sacred circle some more", and the "improvised drugs leads to fun times" aspect of Ashwood Abbey (the best Vigil group  ) translates very well to a tweedy guy who takes the pipe out of his mouth, strokes his close-cropped beard, and says "Are you familiar with Native American religious rituals involving the small spineless cactus called..." (leans in way too close) "... peyote?"Bonus unlockables: One of the members of the Arcanum is a FBI-Special Affairs COINTELPRO plant ("these commies have to be monitored!" - the director, j. edgar hoover), and the 1963 version of Amalgamated Biogenetics (run in oWoD by a splinter Arcanum guy who ran off with a ton of occult crap) would of course be the Cheiron Group. The Arcanum has always been my favorite oWoD Hunter group to turn onto vampires because there's an obvious answer to what to do to a guy who has a wooden stake in his hand and a crucifix in the other, but it's a lot less obvious when it's just some guy in a Volkswagen with a UFO watcher's group bumper sticker, a stack of overdue library books and a notebook. They have no desire to hurt you...but if you don't do something you're going to get loving wrecked when they really start pulling apart your unlife to see how it works. So I'm excited to return to the Arcanum with Vigil mechanics and an unusual setting.
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Feb 15, 2013 17:35
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Dave Brookshaw posted:nMage isn't the angry Left-Wing game of the nWoD. Sure, I'm an angry liberal in RL who likes to shout at the tv when my government act like Evil Priests in D&D, but nMage has way too much "you must be this special to join in" threaded through it. Where it's political, it the politics of looking at whether the incredibly fortunate see a duty to help others be as fortunate, ignore it completely, hold their hands, leave them to it after guving the, the opportunity, patronise them, do the American Dream thing and assume that it was because they were inherently better rather than lucky and anyone could do it if they applied themselves, or revel in it and toy with the little guy. It asks how you react to being a 1%er - your answer can be left wing or right wing, it doesn't care. Turning the "leader-splat" from a boilerplate wealthy Ventrue/Silver Fangs knockoff into radical reovlutionaries was pretty neat. t3h_z0r fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Feb 15, 2013 |
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Feb 15, 2013 18:00
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