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I like the concept of Tremere, but as a Mage thing-- just a bunch of soul vampires, essentially, who got suckered into this notion of unlimited power but ended up with the mother of all catches for not nearly as much pay-off as promised. I'm a fan of most of the soul-stealing stuff, though.
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Apr 4, 2013 20:27
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Nagaraja really fit a "Ghoul" stereotype that Vampire was lacking. I've always kind of wondered how a Nagaraja would play if their flaw was that they had to eat long-dead flesh instead of freshly-dead. Too hard to sell the notion of "hot flesh-eating vampress chicks" to guys when it needs to be done with a mummified corpse. But now that brings to mind Buzzard from The Goon and all the amazing things that come with that. And so it's awesome.
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Apr 4, 2013 20:42
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Ferrinus posted:That's... not been my experience at all? Definitely, you got a little more of an "evil vice-loving tempter" vibe from the Mage corebook, but Intruders really cemented the Abyss as a force of unreason and anti-reality, whereas the Lower Depths has been the home of hypothetical voracious, banished-from-the-real-world-but-still-hungry thaumovores. I want to say the relevant passages are in Summoners. I don't have time to find it right now but I will post it later. It absolutely tried to sell Abyssals great and small as beings with active, thoughtful malice toward humanity. The only reason a greater Abyssal spirit doesn't rip you to pieces the moment you summon it is because it figures it can do more damage by holding off and luring you in to do its work for it. If this is wrong then those passages in Summoners and Intruders are weirdly out of place.
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Apr 4, 2013 21:06
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I'm sure the discussion's come up somewhere in the thread, but as I'm slowly trudging through it (and there's no thread specifically discussing it), I've house-ruled dot-allocation to some degree in the oWoD games I've ST'ed. Here are the basic rules I use: #1 if one of your attributes is 4 or higher, it's highly likely it's something you rely on for a living, or something that occupies the majority of your free time. #2 If one of your abilities is 4 or above, it is what you use in your line of work and, not only that, it's also something you're slightly famous for. I.E. it puts you on such a level that if you don't go to some extent to hide your knack for it, people in the business will know about it. Firearms 4? You're likely a cop, or spend all your free time at the firing range. Either way, people will have noticed your skill and you'll be known for it (and possibly pestered to join clubs or teams or something). This requires some fudging and, depending on the situation, I might give the player a temporary Fame of 1 or 2 and roll it if they're in circles where they might be known. Basically I'm forcing the players to, at least initially, spread their points more evenly, especially in regards to abilities, because it makes a lot more sense for someone to have a lot of 1-dot abilities but only a few, if any, over 3 dots. Once the game's started, as long as it doesn't come from out of nowhere, I don't mind people raising their stats as they please. How do you other ST'ers approach this subject? Do you think this is a good or bad idea?
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Apr 4, 2013 21:58
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citybeatnik posted:Yeah it's -awesome-. One of the games that I don't get to play often enough. I'll likely be running it this summer for my group, to whom I pitched the game as "Who wants to ride around darkest Carpathia and punch a Tremere?"
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Apr 4, 2013 22:04
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Horzaloth posted:How do you other ST'ers approach this subject? Do you think this is a good or bad idea? Honestly in TT I've never found a need to restrict it. I throw out the whole notion that 4 or 5 dots indicates you're Olympic tier or one of a kind or whatever. The other side of the coin is to make sure that most of the skills get some face-time so that players can't just sac that ones they perceive as less useful. What do you think the problem is with over-specialization?
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Apr 4, 2013 22:13
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Horzaloth posted:How do you other ST'ers approach this subject? Do you think this is a good or bad idea? I used to get bent out of shape about it because of the way White Wolf originally flavor-explained what Skill 1 vs. Skill 5 meant, but since so many things can affect a total pool (Attribute, EQ Bonus, Willpower, etc), it really doesn't seem to matter. My problem was under-specialization. People putting down One-Dot attributes or no skill dots, but not really modifying their play to reflect that. So I came out and said that if you put an attribute down at one, you had to actively roleplay a deficiency for that attribute. Int 1? Play stupid. Wits 1? Don't use snappy comebacks. Manipulation 1? All your plans should be two-step-plans maximum. Once I got past the point of some players arguing that they were actually saddled with dot one mental/social attributes in real life, and thus shouldn't actually have to roleplay a deficiency when they assigned only one dot, it worked out. New players would get advice to "pay their taxes." I like the double-dot five tax for nWod, though I guess it might be vanishing. And admittedly, it was kind of a hackneyed fix to over-specialization. I know there was someone who came up with a nWod CharGen system that got rid of the dot system, replacing it fully with experience points and benchmarks. You have 200 XP, and you have to spend some minimum in each category (Attributes, Skills, Merits, Powers). The only "free" dot came in with the Clan's favored Attribute, and then you just got 10XP credit in one of those attributes. I wish I still knew where that website was.
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Apr 4, 2013 22:51
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@Mendrian I guess it's a remnant from how I played a lot in a group that had "figured out" which abilities were most useful and usually put a lot of points into them. I also play very heavily into the "normal people dragged into the paranormal" when I ST and therefore it's always much more fun for me (and, I hope, the players) to have characters who might not be used to handling weapons, political intrigue and the like to do the best they can in the given situation, further showing that the big-league players of the Camarilla aren't just there for the show, they've clawed their way to the top and they've got the skills to match. It's not intended as a power-trip for the ST, but when you realize the party Ventrue is outsmarting the Prince of your city because he's dipped too deep into the well of necessary skills, then you realize you're doing something wrong as a ST. At least, I feel, initially. I guess it's a thematic thing? If the players can easily muscle or outsmart their way out of trouble, then it becomes more difficult as a ST to give them some kind of challenge? Horzaloth fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Apr 4, 2013 |
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Apr 4, 2013 22:58
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Personally, I prefer the notion that the Prince is dangerous not so much because he's just so much better than you could hope to be - generally he's a <i>little</i> better than you, certainly, but that table can turn given time. What makes the leader in any sort of social structure like that dangerous is the web of owed favors and minions that someone in that position is going to have. Let your players outsmart the Prince, sure-- but at their peril, because if he gets wind, he can make the entire city a nightmare for you to exist in. Basically, don't ask your players to pull their punches and make softer-edged builds-- just don't let your NPCs pull theirs. Operating in a society of soulless predators should feel risky.
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Apr 4, 2013 23:06
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That's actually an angle I hadn't considered much, I looked through Chicago at Night and was sort of... underwhelmed by the NPCs in it, if memory serves, but I guess I didn't take into account how much power certain backgrounds can have. EDIT: Looking into Chicago by Night 1st edition, I can't believe that I missed how powerful these guys are. Yeah... Now, I haven't ST:ed Vampire in ages (last time was about 6 or 7 years ago I think), but I'll have to confess that I might've been the sort of ST who relied on flashy effects to make up for social ineptitude. I never managed to pull off imposing that well. I've only begun perusing the nWoD books very recently because my former ST was VERY opposed to them, and I like what I see so far, even if elitism and fear of new things make me constantly look back at oWoD with nostalgia goggles on. Horzaloth fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Apr 5, 2013 |
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Apr 4, 2013 23:32
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Nick at Nite posted:Personally, I prefer the notion that the Prince is dangerous not so much because he's just so much better than you could hope to be - generally he's a <i>little</i> better than you, certainly, but that table can turn given time. What makes the leader in any sort of social structure like that dangerous is the web of owed favors and minions that someone in that position is going to have. Let your players outsmart the Prince, sure-- but at their peril, because if he gets wind, he can make the entire city a nightmare for you to exist in. Yeah I agree with this. There's perception - and I don't blame anybody for it, it's a common trope in Masquerade games - that politically connected characters, especially Princes and elders - just have more dice to throw at problems. And I think it's actually fairly uncommon, in actual practice, that Princes get to be where they are just because they have the highest Politics skill in the city. I'm not saying that you're saying this, Horzaloth. It shouldn't matter that your starting Ventrue is outsmarting the Prince. Having more politics dots or whatever is only a small part of the equation. Skill growth and political growth are't or shouldn't be directly connected, though they are correlated. As far as the horror thing goes - ah yeah, I feel you on that. I think part of the problem is that I just assume that the char-gen system does produce 'normal' characters. I don't think of characters maxed out for Firearms and Dodge to be somehow special. They also get their (social) poo poo pushed in the moment they have to deal with the Harpy. I mean, even to go back to this hypothetical Ventrue for a second - the Prince likely has a variety of Skills spread around in his areas of competence. The Ventrue can only really afford to specialize in few. If there was a solution to the problem, I would say just flat out ban Skills above 3 dots. Specializing too much in Attributes is kind of its own solution, though, so I wouldn't worry about that too much.
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Apr 4, 2013 23:42
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The Tremere are great because they are the hardest working guys in the Camarilla and consistently, consistently grab that bronze medal. They bust their nerdy wizard butts, make themselves vampires, then fight their way past a shitload of bloodlines to a position of power, then step on millenia-old Clans to get close, so close to the top, "I can play this game! I really can!" but in the end they can't even beat the loving Toreador, who spend their time getting wasted and having sex and apparently doing nothing, let alone the Ventrue, #1 for the last 3,000 years, who at least have the decency to look like they're putting in the effort. Hell, half the time they have to share the bronze medal with the Brujah or Nosferatu. You need some weedy little Poindexter to resent getting his face pushed in and launch a ridiculously petty occult plan that gets out of hand? You need a Tremere.
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Apr 5, 2013 00:02
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Reene posted:I want to say the relevant passages are in Summoners. I don't have time to find it right now but I will post it later. It absolutely tried to sell Abyssals great and small as beings with active, thoughtful malice toward humanity. The only reason a greater Abyssal spirit doesn't rip you to pieces the moment you summon it is because it figures it can do more damage by holding off and luring you in to do its work for it. I haven't read Summoners in a bit, but I don't remember a lot of active malice (except for the suggestion that some Intruders actually are scheming, silver-tongued fiends, since that's just how it shakes out sometimes). I think it's true that most Abyssal entities want to infect/corrupt/destroy the physical world, for roughly the same reason that Ice-9 wants to infect/corrupt/destroy all water. It's definitely not true of all Intruders, though - in fact, the Acamoth, from the corebook, pretty much sit there sullenly wishing really hard they could go home.
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Apr 5, 2013 00:21
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Ever thought that you as a player might be buying into the Tremere propaganda? The Tremere (Like the CIA) LOVE every Kindred to think 'The Tremere are behind it all! They see everything, they can do anything they want, don't gently caress with them man!' when in fact they're pissing themselves stupid hoping nobody finds out that yes, if you assault a Chantry that's rigged to blow or wander around Vienna, you're going to get hosed up, but really they have no idea what you're doing to their neonates when they're in the field, and no, their Elders don't have great political clout (because they're Wizards who locked themselves indoors!) and no, their Magic isn't really that far-reaching and powerful at all, and a creative use of basic Presence, or Celerity, never mind weirder poo poo like Obtenebration or Chimerstry used in anger will actually have them in serious trouble. Then to top it all off, if you're an old enough Tremere (or unlucky enough to be a Mage they embraced trying to trial reversing their previous mistakes) they had real, genuine Magick power in their hands, and in the name of letting Goratrix, Etrius, Tremere and Meerlinda carry on dicking about, they hosed the entire House out of the Ascension and damned them all for eternity, but you can't even take revenge because not only did they set themselves up as the biggest Vampire Wizard Badasses at the top of the Pyramid, they also stacked the entire Clan against you by blood bonding everyone one step to themselves. I'd love to do a campaign with a Tremere who wants to learn Path of the Levinbolt, with the endgame being discovering Path of the Levinbolt is precisely that - A made up myth by the Tremere to keep the Gangrel/Nosferatu/Tzimisce from just pulling their arms & legs off about the whole Gargoyle thing. Basically - The Tremere can be interesting and balanced, it just takes your ST differentiating player & character knowledge, and thinking about what it would 'realistically' be like for the Tremere in a given area.
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Apr 5, 2013 00:22
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The real book on Abyssal entities isn't Summoners, anyway, it's Intruders. Intruders is such a good book.
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Apr 5, 2013 00:26
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Barbed Tongues posted:[...] It's in the OP.
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Apr 5, 2013 00:31
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Mors Rattus posted:The real book on Abyssal entities isn't Summoners, anyway, it's Intruders. Intruders is such a good book. It's good, but it really is specialized toward stuff that has to be destroyed. I mean if you simply don't like tempters you don't have to use them, but why ever not? Ferrinus posted:I think it's true that most Abyssal entities want to infect/corrupt/destroy the physical world, for roughly the same reason that Ice-9 wants to infect/corrupt/destroy all water. It's definitely not true of all Intruders, though - in fact, the Acamoth, from the corebook, pretty much sit there sullenly wishing really hard they could go home. Yeah acamoth as written are pretty silly on the whole. Both the part you mentioned and the inexplicably rigid rule that they're only allowed to give investments in return for doing this one boring thing. (And being anchored to the problematic Wisdom system but that's a different issue.) I guess I can understand the benefit of having a "tempter" that can take care of business with a few dice rolls and a night's sleep. Simple, clean, doesn't take up the whole session. If you had to light 36,000 candles in the shape of a pentagram across Texas every time you dealt with the Abyss it wouldn't really be "the easy way out," would it? (Although the difficulty of intentionally summoning an acamoth kind of spoils that.) I can even understand putting it in the core book; if they only had space for one example of the tempter archetype, it probably would be a stripped-down "roll dice lose Wisdom gain X" type of thing. But I can't understand why after everything that's been published, acamoth are still regarded as the gold standard for Abyssal tempters instead of just one particular breed of minor demon, or why they should be the only type of Abyssal tempter that actually lives in the Fallen World. McNerd fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Apr 5, 2013 |
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Apr 5, 2013 01:03
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McNerd posted:It's good, but it really is specialized toward stuff that has to be destroyed. I mean if you simply don't like tempters you don't have to use them, but why ever not? I don't really agree with you, given how many of the Intruders aren't even physical and can't effectively be fought. Some of them are ideas, at least one of them is a numerology system, one of them is a martial art. A corrupting martial art. It does corruption, just not in the straightforward sense of tempting people to power. Intruders presents an Abyss that doesn't really care about you so much as it ruins things just by being, and does not actively tempt so much as corrupt in ways that cause positive effects for you sometimes. Because the Abyss, by and large, is impersonal and doesn't really care about you or what you do.
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Apr 5, 2013 01:17
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Mors Rattus posted:I don't really agree with you, given how many of the Intruders aren't even physical and can't effectively be fought. Some of them are ideas, at least one of them is a numerology system, one of them is a martial art. A corrupting martial art. It does corruption, just not in the straightforward sense of tempting people to power. Intruders presents an Abyss that doesn't really care about you so much as it ruins things just by being, and does not actively tempt so much as corrupt in ways that cause positive effects for you sometimes. Well yeah, but my point is, the solution is still to destroy that thing or seal it away or kill everyone who's ever seen it or whatever. There is almost nothing in Intruders that you would ever even think about trying to use to your benefit, unless you are a full-fledged insane Abyss worshipper. Even as a weapon, most of it is way too destructive to try and harness. I guess The Final Spell of Eli-Bin-Whoever might be an exception. I mean you can look right at Left-Hand Path (or any other relevant book published after Intruders) and see it's not as though the writers threw out acamoth and gulmoth and decided the Abyss doesn't have tempters anymore. It does offer temptation, just not in Intruders, because that's not what Intruders is about. The other thing, which we haven't been talking about, is the whole notion that the Abyss contains infinite multitudes. Like for instance the whole version of the cosmology where the Annunaki sleep in the Abyss and Abyssal manifestations are their dreams. Some of the resulting beings are sentient, and some aren't. Some can and care to interact with humans, and some can't or don't. Some has complex motivations and some don't. Maybe some have an understanding that they are of a place called the Abyss and that the Fallen World is somehow their enemy, and some don't. Maybe some were conceived with an inherent purpose and others weren't. As a whole, the Abyss fits the description you gave, but there's no reason that individual manifestations have to fit that description. They don't have to have much in common at all, except they're never warm and fuzzy because Edit: I think there's also some bias where the rare few Abyssal beings who actually are interested in human interaction are more likely to turn up than the rest. Tempters in particular are more likely to be deliberately summoned, even if they're few in number. McNerd fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Apr 5, 2013 |
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Apr 5, 2013 01:37
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@Mendrian You're right about a lot of things, I think it's easy to get blind to faulty thinking if it's being prevalent in the group, thankfully I'm STing to a group almost completely fresh to the oWoD (some of them have played Bloodlines (drat good introduction to the oWoD if you ask me) and some have lurked in threads like these) and it'll be over skype so I think I'll be able to relatively well convey a mood that I never thought was there when I used to ST TT. To return to the 'faulty thinking' (got a bit off-track there), we've usually not resorted much to backgrounds in our playing. Sure, we've rolled contacts every now and then, but stuff like influence, allies, even resources scarcely popped up in our games and it's only now that I muse on it that I realize what a big facet of gameplay that we missed. I say we because in my previous group, we all sort of took turns STing although we had one guy (who owned and had read more or less all the books) who was the Prime ST. On a related tangent, has anyone here STed Ashes to Ashes, and have they managed to continue to keep the chronicle in Chicago? I designed my own Boston by Night a long time ago (think I still have the documents), but I just really like how Chicago has a lot of well-fleshed out NPCs to work with. Any fun experiences from it?
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Apr 5, 2013 09:53
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McNerd posted:Yeah acamoth as written are pretty silly on the whole. Both the part you mentioned and the inexplicably rigid rule that they're only allowed to give investments in return for doing this one boring thing. (And being anchored to the problematic Wisdom system but that's a different issue.) I liked them, actually. It's a nice reversal when the default listed demonic being wants to experience memories of home rather than to escape from its binding circle and wreak havoc or to eat everyone's soul or whatever. I'm pretty sure that doesn't remain true under the Summoners paradigm of "acamoth" meaning any abyssal entity that's been stumbled upon in the fallen world rather than summoned, though.
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Apr 5, 2013 15:19
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My opinion is that an Abyssal entity is a sort of hologram composed of its bundle of strangeness, its past interactions with the rest of the Fallen World and whatever the observer projects on to it. Without these combined elements, its "waveform" would not "collapse" into anything comprehensible. The core acamoth have the issue where we were overcautious about these third party enhancement opportunities because past experience had shown that folks could stack the poo poo out of innocuous looking things. I didn't work on them, but if I ever had another crack at them I'd probably make them more potent and give them a little more personality.
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Apr 5, 2013 17:45
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If anyone is interested, I think I piqued Fuzz's interest in running another V:tM game pbp. Or rather, rebooting the one he ran a while back. The setting was LA in the early 70s, the characters were duped into committing an assassination and are now on the run from a Blood Hunt. Real A-Team poo poo, trying to get by while digging up information to clear their names. If that premise sounds like your bag, hit us up in #anarch-team on SynIRC and we can start getting ready. Loomer, I know you and Pseudosavior might be into this. 
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Apr 5, 2013 21:10
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Well, I found the passage in Summoners I was probably thinking of:quote:Of course, the foremost peril of Abyssal summonings Of course this could easily apply to just Gulmoth I suppose, but some of the language there is vague enough ("many of the creatures of the Void") that it seems like it could apply to Abyssals in general. I don't have Intruders with me at the moment though, and I'm aware that's a more definitive text.
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Apr 5, 2013 21:31
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Vicissitude posted:If anyone is interested, I think I piqued Fuzz's interest in running another V:tM game pbp. Or rather, rebooting the one he ran a while back. The setting was LA in the early 70s, the characters were duped into committing an assassination and are now on the run from a Blood Hunt. Real A-Team poo poo, trying to get by while digging up information to clear their names. If that premise sounds like your bag, hit us up in #anarch-team on SynIRC and we can start getting ready. I'll give it a shot but life's a lot busier than it was last time.
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Apr 6, 2013 01:30
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Almost three years and I'm not giving up the goat yet, Loomer!
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Apr 6, 2013 02:16
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Okay, here it is in Intruders:quote:In fact, the Abyss is more of a separate and I know it's an argument from a couple days ago, but not having my book around to find this was bugging me. 
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Apr 6, 2013 09:42
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That description of the Abyss makes it sound an awful lot more like the Prince of a Hundred Thousand Leaves than I was led to believe.
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Apr 6, 2013 13:52
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Doodmons posted:That description of the Abyss makes it sound an awful lot more like the Prince of a Hundred Thousand Leaves than I was led to believe. Makes sense surely, as the P1KL is itself an abyssal entity and its MO fits in with the wider abyss.
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Apr 6, 2013 16:35
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Here's another question. How much do Abyssal entities interact with one another? I can't think of any specific examples of distinct entities that work together (if you don't count the things from Intruders that have a multi-stage life cycle or whatever). I get the vague impression this is deliberate, as the Shadow Realm has a ton of social structure and maybe the writers wanted to avoid the Abyss becoming too similar. On the other hand, I think it's been suggested that acamoth and gulmoth have enough of a social network to obtain goods and services for a pact. Also, some of their goals seem mutually exclusive. For instance the Prince and the Nemesis Continuum probably can't simultaneously become true. Would they tend to oppose each other? Or would they conspire to erode the structure of the Fallen World so far that this logical contradiction can be sustained, which I think is how things work in the Abyss itself? Or are they so different they can't comprehend one another, so any interaction between them is basically accidental? (The last seems very likely, but Boston Unveiled suggests that the Prince itself may be the third signatory to the Secret Covenant, which I would have considered equally difficult.) I assume a lot of these questions have no one canonical answer, but it's still fun to think about.
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Apr 6, 2013 17:35
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McNerd posted:Here's another question. How much do Abyssal entities interact with one another? I can't think of any specific examples of distinct entities that work together (if you don't count the things from Intruders that have a multi-stage life cycle or whatever). I get the vague impression this is deliberate, as the Shadow Realm has a ton of social structure and maybe the writers wanted to avoid the Abyss becoming too similar. On the other hand, I think it's been suggested that acamoth and gulmoth have enough of a social network to obtain goods and services for a pact. Considering the scale of most of the more intelligent (and therefore, powerful) Abyssal entities, I would think that an active cooperation between two of them would pretty much be a TPK for any Mage group below Master level.
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Apr 6, 2013 18:12
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I imagine its simultaneously possible, contradictory, horrifying, and true for Abyssal entities to inscrutably reinforce each other and "cooperate" in ways that are hazardous to even theorize.
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Apr 6, 2013 18:19
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:Considering the scale of most of the more intelligent (and therefore, powerful) Abyssal entities, I would think that an active cooperation between two of them would pretty much be a TPK for any Mage group below Master level. I get the impression that Abyssal entities don't strictly speaking exist until they are summoned for some reason. Acamoth notwithstanding. That being said cooperation seems antithetical to Abyssal sensibilities. The idea of any kind of positive relationship, even a business relationship, existing without some intent to ruin the other party seems unlikely. There's no Team Abyss, with a unified Abyssal Goals or whatever. Every individual species of Abyssal creature seems to be unique, and a unique expression of non-existence, at that.
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Apr 6, 2013 18:20
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Mendrian posted:I get the impression that Abyssal entities don't strictly speaking exist until they are summoned for some reason. Acamoth notwithstanding. I agree, generally, but I was more commenting in terms of how I would look at it as a Storyteller - while I wouldn't necessarily refuse to use some of the less powerful entities co-existing in an area in a chronicle, I'd be hesitant to throw the party up against a coalition of the Abyssal heavy-hitters simply based on their power alone. Though I have to admire that the antagonists presented in Intruders seem to be sufficiently varied that nearly anyone has an Intruder they can deal with, without going outside their Path archetypes for skills/Arcana.
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Apr 6, 2013 18:28
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McNerd posted:Here's another question. How much do Abyssal entities interact with one another? I can't think of any specific examples of distinct entities that work together (if you don't count the things from Intruders that have a multi-stage life cycle or whatever). I get the vague impression this is deliberate, as the Shadow Realm has a ton of social structure and maybe the writers wanted to avoid the Abyss becoming too similar. On the other hand, I think it's been suggested that acamoth and gulmoth have enough of a social network to obtain goods and services for a pact. I think some would work together and some would not. Greater Abyssal gods are described as universes unto themselves and it's conceivable that they have their own self-contained network of drones or pawns as well as more intelligent beings that handle certain things for them. Other Abyssal entities may perceive themselves to have different agendas from their brethren. Imagine two Acamoth pitting their cults together because they both desire access to a resource or territory, that sort of thing. It's interesting, the way certain Abyssals are described occasionally comes close to sympathetic - they can't help that they are by their nature corrupting and hateful, but they desire and savor the small sensory experiences that life in the real world has to offer. Some of these beings just want to smell a rose or wear silk; they just happen to be willing to slaughter and destroy as much as they need to in order to get what they want. Reene fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Apr 6, 2013 |
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Apr 6, 2013 18:56
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Reene posted:Okay, here it is in Intruders: Yeah, that really does overlap with the way the lower depths are portrayed. I think I pretty much forgot about that language because it doesn't quite jibe with how the intruders themselves are presented; it doesn't really scan to present the abyss as a rapacious, relentless invader except insofar as rust is hungry to consume metal or the water behind a dam slavers to flood the town beyond it. Definitely, some exponents of the abyss are snarling, voracious soul reavers but it doesn't work to make the entirety of the void act like that. It makes sense as the understanding of the abyss developed by those used to fighting it, though. A long-suffering Guardian who's risked life and limb burning out incursion after incursion probably no longer needs their Order's theology to envision the abyss as a scheming, tireless fiend ever searching for novel avenues of attack rather than as a really unpleasant but broadly impersonal cosmic phenomenon.
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Apr 6, 2013 20:28
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I have a couple questions for you guys. For a very long time, since VtM 1st Ed through 2002ish World of Darkness games ate up about 80% of my gaming time and dollars. Right about the time nWoD came out, two things happened. First I moved away from my hometown and longtime friends/gaming group and I read the Gehenna supplement. I will be honest, that they were killing not only the games I loved, but also the rich world and lore of those games irritated; however, the fact that they were publishing (and thus canonically putting an end to oWoD) pissed me off even more. I did end up picking VtR when it launched, but really didn't like the truncation of the clans, the change of the origin story, and most of all the lack of political complexity I found. So now I'm a lot older, back in my hometown, and thinking of giving it another go. My question is, how has the nWoD developed over the last 10 years or so? Did White Wolf stick with its planned simplicity, or did they end up rebuilding an entire complex lore? Also, how are the new Mage rules compared to old Mage? If I do reintroduce WoD to our repertoire it would be Mage, the first version of which I think had the most innovative magic system I'd ever seen published. So if they changed over to "spells" or just something analogous to vampire disciplines I would want to stick with oWoD Mage.
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Apr 7, 2013 00:07
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You could always just get VtM20.
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Apr 7, 2013 00:39
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ZombieLenin posted:I have a couple questions for you guys. For a very long time, since VtM 1st Ed through 2002ish World of Darkness games ate up about 80% of my gaming time and dollars. There isn't an overarching metaplot, if that's what you're asking. Some backstory hooks and fiction have appeared, but not anywhere near oWoD's Final Nights. New Mage works like Old Mage, as well. It's different, but essentially the same.
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Apr 7, 2013 00:54
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ZombieLenin posted:I have a couple questions for you guys. For a very long time, since VtM 1st Ed through 2002ish World of Darkness games ate up about 80% of my gaming time and dollars. If you were to buy the Mage corebook you could be easily fooled into thinking that there are discrete "spells" that mages cast. This is because the Mage corebook is loving terrible. The giant list of spells are actually just examples and the real magic rules are found under Creative Thaumaturgy, and in a supplement book Tome of the Mysteries. Long story short, you are a mage: you can do anything. Also new Strix Chronicles Requiem is much, much better than previous Requiem and especially Masquerade. While there is no canonical "metaplot" all the books taken together write up a (thankfully totally optional) very rich and detailed world with a lot of intrigue. It's awesome. Play it. Main difference is there is no origin story - it is not important, nobody cares.
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Apr 7, 2013 13:13
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