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blurry!
Jun 14, 2006

Sorry for Party Flocking
kindredoftheeast.mp3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEmJ-VWPDM4

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Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Ferrinus posted:

Well, I guess I finished my gigantic rewrite of all of Mage: the Awakening's magic rules, magical paraphernalia, and Arcana. I'll put it up on a wiki or something in the next few days and link it here...? Hopefully we'll be on a new page by then because all these youtubes are making this thread an incredible chore to load.

:toot:

It's up! The formatting is a little less clean than it was in a series of SA posts and it's no doubt still littered with typos or missing tags or whatever, but what the hell:

:siren: https://the-act-of-hubris.obsidianportal.com/wikis/main-page :siren:

Bits and pieces of this system have been in use in our group's WoD game for a while, but we haven't been running honest-to-god Mage PCs for an extended period so I'll be playtesting this stuff in earnest soon. The fiddly dicepool assembly/resolution stuff might, therefore, end up getting adjusted or even scrapped and replaced.

I'm not sure changes to the core combat engine or whatever - especially ones that aren't easily compatible with GMC's rules, though they can probably be tooled that way - are of use to most people here, but I hope people will enjoy the work we've done on fleshing out the Arcana and elaborating on the importance of Mana, Atlantean runes, and all those other setting elements that Awakening's core rules tended to make you take for granted. If anyone reads any of this stuff and has thoughts on it, I want to hear them!

Bigup DJ
Nov 8, 2012

Ferrinus posted:

If anyone reads any of this stuff and has thoughts on it, I want to hear them!

I love what you've done with Spirit and I really love the idea that spirits = emergent phenomena, but isn't everything emergent? Isn't everything the emergent product of the interactions of all its tiny little pieces? If spirits emerge independently, why do they take the shape of categories which people have invented? Like if they're actually independent of human thought, there shouldn't really be a spirit of "sharp edges" because sharpness and edged-ness are concepts we invented. There might be a spirit of the concept of sharpness, or of sharp edges, but then they're just concepts and you may as well put them in the Astral. Without people there's actually no such thing as distinctness - there's no way of telling where a concept or where anywhere else begins or ends, because we invented the idea of beginnings and endings, wholes and parts. Do you know what you're tampering with here Ferrinus??!?!?

This goes back to a problem I have with the game more broadly - why are the Shadow and the Astral Realms separate in the first place? What's the difference between the spirit of the meadow and my idea of the meadow? Can ideas have spirits? Can spirits have ideas? Can the spirit of my idea of the meadow have an idea-spirit about itself???

Attorney at Funk
Jun 3, 2008

...the person who says honestly that he despairs is closer to being cured than all those who are not regarded as despairing by themselves or others.

Bigup DJ posted:

Like if they're actually independent of human thought, there shouldn't really be a spirit of "sharp edges" because sharpness and edged-ness are concepts we invented.
*dons floppy Mystagogue hat*

The logical conclusion, then, is that they aren't.

We have here a premise: that category is an order the human mind imposes on the world. This idea has a lot of weight and history in Sleeper philosophy, psychology, and science. Many educated people take it for granted.

But we Know (the big-K Knowing that indicates revelatory gnosis) that this is untrue. It flies in the face of the empirical data afforded to us by Awakened praxis. The Arcana teach us that the integrative relations between one given knowing thing and all the myriad potential objects of its knowledge, or the means by which a knowing thing comes to know - which we call, in sum, the Arcanum of Mind - is a whole separate sphere of existence (and there's only ten of these!) from the process by which a phenomenon establishes itself as knowable - this reflexive, consumptive identity-process which we call, in sum, the Arcanum of Spirit.

We Know that this is the case. Magic has shown this truth of herself to us. We are left to reconcile this truth with the limited and contingent understanding we acquired through the Quiescence, of the Lie. This is not a contradiction in terms, but a revelatory mystery that challenges us to shake off what we've learned for what we might yet know.

Put another way: we know that mass and energy are equivalent. Einstein discovered that. However, we Know this is false - Forces and Matter are also distinct Arcana. We Know this just as surely as we Know that knowing and the knowable are separate and inalienable categories, ones we discover rather than impose on the world.

So are you wrong? No. Was Einstein wrong? No. But these truths are contingent on the limited reflections of Supernal law in Fallen World logic. We must challenge them constantly, and shake them off when necessary, if we wish to seriously pursue greater gnostic understanding.

tl;dr - Yeah. Weird.

Nicolae Carpathia
Nov 7, 2004
I no longer believe in the greater purpose.

Ferrinus posted:

Bits and pieces of this system have been in use in our group's WoD game for a while, but we haven't been running honest-to-god Mage PCs for an extended period so I'll be playtesting this stuff in earnest soon.

Does this mean you're going to put Mage PCs in your existing WoD game? Or does it mean you're going to be starting a new game of Mage? Because if it's the latter, I am one hundred percent on board.

Attorney at Funk posted:

*dons floppy Mystagogue hat*

:golfclap:

Attorney at Funk
Jun 3, 2008

...the person who says honestly that he despairs is closer to being cured than all those who are not regarded as despairing by themselves or others.
I'm definitely not putting Mage PCs in the Vampire game I'm running, if that's what you're asking. I need full cosmic license to troll Mages into the ground that I don't get if I have to worry about an actual person playing one.

Lazy Bear
Feb 1, 2013

Never too lazy to dance with the angels
I noticed the OP doesn't give any love to Geist. Now, I understand it's probably not the first thing that people wanna jump on when they see the options before them, and I'll be the first to admit that sometimes it's trying a little too hard to be 'cool' and falls flat or looks :emo:, but I at least find myself enamoured with the themes it attempts to explore. Loss, grief, second chances and their unspoken costs, and even things as simple as what we take for granted in life. Anyone have any stories of a particularly moving or interesting moment playing Geist?

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



I got a used copy of Geist a few years ago. Every time I start reading it, I end up going back to Wraith or Orpheus.

If you like those themes you should really check out the oWoD equivalents. They were probably the most 'mature' mainstream RPGs of their time, and they both (largely) avoid the zeitgeist 90s katanas and black trenchcoats that permeate oWoD.

Lazy Bear
Feb 1, 2013

Never too lazy to dance with the angels
Problem is, I'm not fond of oWoD. I find the systems tend to get in the way of the story more often than I'd like.

GimpInBlack
Sep 27, 2012

That's right, kids, take lots of drugs, leave the universe behind, and pilot Enlightenment Voltron out into the cosmos to meet Alien Jesus.

Lazy Bear posted:

I noticed the OP doesn't give any love to Geist. Now, I understand it's probably not the first thing that people wanna jump on when they see the options before them, and I'll be the first to admit that sometimes it's trying a little too hard to be 'cool' and falls flat or looks :emo:, but I at least find myself enamoured with the themes it attempts to explore. Loss, grief, second chances and their unspoken costs, and even things as simple as what we take for granted in life. Anyone have any stories of a particularly moving or interesting moment playing Geist?

Not really a specific moment per se, but when I run Geist I have a few tweaks to the setting and system I generally use:

First, I monkey a bit with WoD metaphysics and flip-flop the frequency of ghosts. Rather than "people with extraordinary unfinished business or passion come back as ghosts, everybody else goes :shrug:," you basically have to be a Buddha to not leave a ghost behind. Sin-Eaters can use the Pass On Ceremony to ensure that a recently-dead person goes on to the afterlife without stopping over. Ghosts are freaking everywhere in my Geist games, just packed hundreds, thousands deep in some places. Cemeteries especially are packed, usually with very old ghosts: Ghosts can have anchors as usual, but the ghost's mortal remains (or components thereof) always count as Anchors. I've had some players take advantage of that by, for example, hiding a ghostly ally's teeth or small bones around to create a surveillance network. I also tend to make the divide between resolving anchors vs. destroying them clearer: Resolving anchors lets ghosts move on, destroying them sends the ghost to the Underworld.

I also tend to suggest that Archetypes come more from the Geist than the character, and encourage players to define a few of their Skill dots as having come from the Geist's memories--it's subtle, but it goes a ways toward making the Geists themselves feel more significant than just a source of superpowers. Before GMC I would tweak the Synerggy "sins" list accordingly--now I'd probably just use the Integrity model and let the player decide what breaks her personal Synergy with her Geist. I'd also write some new Synergy-loss Conditions built around the idea of your Geist taking over--not in a lovely "LOL you can't play your character any more" way, but something like "replace your Virtue and Vice with your Geist's. Resolve when you've fulfilled each one once."

The last one, and the biggest one overall, is I have a completely overhauled version of the Manifestation and Key system. The idea of having separate powers for each combination of Manifestation/Key is a cool one, but the net result is that the game just has too drat many to be interesting or fun. I've lost more Geist players to character creation than just about any other WoD game. My system simplifies things a lot: Each Manifestation is a list of powers level 1-5, each keyed to an Attribute. Normally you roll Attribute + Psyche to activate the powers, but that's where Keys come in. Each Key has a Key Skill, which you can add to the dice pool of your Manifestations--but along with that, it has a small, mostly story-based drawback that hits you with a curse. (e.g. the Cold Wind Key lets you add Subterfuge to your Manifestation dice pools, but within 24 hours some small possession your character treasures will be lost or destroyed.) Keys also have a small non-Manifestation related boon and a particular condition that gives you 8-again on your Manifestation rolls. Keeping with the Cold Wind example, you can spend 1 Plasm to not have to breathe for a turn, and if it's either winter or you're using a Manifestation to cause sorrow or grief, you get 8-again on the roll.

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



Orpheus was literally the last game to come from oWoD, and by then the mechanics were a lot more manageable than you're probably remembering. It's also intended as a stand-alone game, with no splat treadmill. In a lot of ways, it's practically the first nWoD game.

Unfortunately, there's a number of mechanical reasons you're never going to play Wraith. But the material is still a good read and full of great ideas.

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world
Geist should be a game in which you play as an actual ghost, just one that's been imbued by the power of the Underworld with unusual power and capacity for change. It should be a thing that unless you're expending effort and maybe game resources, the living can't even see or touch you.

My favorite part of the original writeup of ghosts in the original World of Darkness corebook was how horrifying the whole thing was for the ghost, how some of the biggest challenges a ghost could face was getting across even a few words' worth of information to the living.

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



I've read that Book of the Dead exponentially increases the quality of Geist. Can anyone confirm this?

GimpInBlack
Sep 27, 2012

That's right, kids, take lots of drugs, leave the universe behind, and pilot Enlightenment Voltron out into the cosmos to meet Alien Jesus.

moths posted:

I've read that Book of the Dead exponentially increases the quality of Geist. Can anyone confirm this?

Well, I'm a little biased seeing as how I worked on it, but I'm inclined to say yeah, it adds a lot--more reasons to go to the Underworld, more stuff to do there, more Deep Dominions, etc.

Daeren
Aug 18, 2009

YER MUSTACHE IS CROOKED

Attorney at Funk posted:

I'm definitely not putting Mage PCs in the Vampire game I'm running, if that's what you're asking. I need full cosmic license to troll Mages into the ground that I don't get if I have to worry about an actual person playing one.

Despite me having mages be more correct in their assessment of cosmology than some STs (while getting some stuff very wrong), I also love to mess with them in my writing, because they kinda have it coming.

In the vampire game I'm almost done running, the only appearances by mages have involved them going :psypop: at the PCs casually shattering their preconceptions and dealing with things even they were terrified of. In another, an old Changeling game, the standout scene involving mages was when the city's Consilium leaders used a Changeling's contracts to get in direct (heavily, heavily filtered/watered down) contact with the spirit of the Sun, and...well, I summed this up before in an old thread.

Daeren posted:

At one point this Changeling, seeking an alliance with the local Consilium for the Freehold, allowed the local who's who of mages to do some information gathering about him and the Changeling nature. When he mentioned he could talk to the Sun, the local Thrice-Great mentor called bullshit. He then had a Thyrsus rig up an improvised device to let other people hear the Sun talk to him, and the Sun immediately took the opportunity to trash talk the mages, blaming them for everything wrong with the world and dropping all sorts of dirt it had seen the mages get into. The Thrice-Great keeled over in a dead faint partway through and the Sun called him a pussy.

That game's tied for my favorite I've ever run with the current vampire game. Some other quotes from me talking about the Sun, since last time I brought this up people loved it:

Daeren posted:

One of the players had Contracts of Communion (Celestial Objects) because we both agreed the concept was pretty awesome. We balanced it by making it more of a conversation with a shard of their consciousness that doesn't have access to the vast majority of its knowledge (also if he screwed up a roll bad enough he might accidentally contact a black hole whose spiritual counterpart is pretty much an Acamoth, which would have been a 'save vs. burning the sheet' moment.) So, I ended up making up personalities for the planets, Sun, and other celestial objects, which led to a lot of this extrapolation to begin with.

The Sun CONSTANTLY YELLS IN BOLD CAPSLOCK TO DEMONSTRATE JUST HOW INDESCRIBABLY HUGE ITS CONSCIOUSNESS IS COMPARED TO THE LISTENER'S EVEN FILTERED INTO A FORM THAT DOESN'T MAKE THEIR HEAD EXPLODE INSTANTLY. It intensely dislikes how humanity has such a strong influence over it via their essence flows, since their belief about the sun colors its personality and power. The fact that the Sun is mostly seen as a perfectly ordinary natural thing that hippies can use for power, and whose danger is mitigated by a pair of shades and sunblock, has made it quite bitter. It also dislikes how all the sun-cults have died out and gives people cancer out of spite when they don't listen to it yelling about vampires. Speaking of which, the Sun is so old it's forgotten exactly why it hates vampires so much, but thinks it may have something to do with vampires stealing his blood sacrifices in Aztec times (which isn't the real reason.) The Sun was actually one of the most fun characters to play in that chronicle because it was the most bombastic, arrogant, overblown jackass who still clung desperately to any conversation with someone other than the planets.

Also, the fact that a Changeling could talk casually to the spirit of the Goddamn Sun made the Mages and Werewolves he met near the end incredibly afraid and confused.

Attorney at Funk
Jun 3, 2008

...the person who says honestly that he despairs is closer to being cured than all those who are not regarded as despairing by themselves or others.
Our game doesn't (yet) operate at the scale where Mages being right or wrong about the setting would be apparent. Mage NPCs have mostly served as a source of stresses and messes the Vampire PCs (and their plucky Werewolf mascot) have had to deal with. Well, that and a local Panopticon pylon in one of the towns they drove through convinced/manipulated them to do the pylon's dirty work and in the process cement the pylon as the major uncontested power base in the area. They had a pretty sensible case, though! The Seers often do.

Androc
Dec 26, 2008

Attorney at Funk posted:

the Vampire PCs (and their plucky Werewolf mascot)

Yeah, so, I'm gonna need the story on this one.

Attorney at Funk
Jun 3, 2008

...the person who says honestly that he despairs is closer to being cured than all those who are not regarded as despairing by themselves or others.

Androc posted:

Yeah, so, I'm gonna need the story on this one.

It's a road trip vampire game. The way it happened is this:

Our heroes, the vampire PCs, got booted out of their hometown in Southern California for a collection of mostly-true reasons, like "learning Cruac illicitly", or "being The Unholy". One of them was a Dragon, who on the way out of town was told to meet up with her tutor, who was running some kind of long-form Stanford Prison Experiment out in the desert.

They drive up to the complex after seeing a werewolf howling on the roof, silhouetted by the full moon (no great geniuses are our heroes) and find out a couple things:

One, the Dragon's tutor was running some kind of docility-inducing Jesus Camp (if you read the beginning of The Invisibles, this was my primary inspiration) in furtherance of his research on the Coil of the Beast.

Two, the werewolf is a teenaged kid, one of the inmates/prisoners at the camp, who was of special interest to the tutor as an experimental subject.

Three, in the process of conducting these experiments, the werewolf teen First Changed, and killed the tutor, as well as every other kid and staff member in the complex.

Four, the werewolf kid is somehow branded before their eyes, in a way that matches brands revealed on one of the Vampire PCs (specifically the one who is the Unholy). In the process he (the werewolf kid) kind of imprints on her (the Unholy).

They take him home, but when he gets home he finds out hunters are after him and it isn't safe there. So he tracks down the vampires, who are sleeping off the day in their VW Bus which they hid in a burned-out carwash, and convinces them to take him with them.

That's the plot explanation, anyway. The actual reason is that the werewolf PC has been a pet character concept for one of my friends for ages and he just had to be a special goddamn snowflake. Christ.

Androc
Dec 26, 2008

Attorney at Funk posted:

That's the plot explanation, anyway. The actual reason is that the werewolf PC has been a pet character concept for one of my friends for ages and he just had to be a special goddamn snowflake. Christ.

It is fun to be special ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

JDCorley
Jun 28, 2004

Elminster don't surf
I went the other way from Book of the Dead in my Geist games and made the characters' troubles really really mundane, at least on the surface. And I staged my mini-campaign along the "five stages of grief", one stage per chapter, one major problem themed along that stage per chapter.

And in the spirit of my earlier post, here's:

Geist.avi

"Your uncle's a bad man, Danny." "Okay."

GimpInBlack
Sep 27, 2012

That's right, kids, take lots of drugs, leave the universe behind, and pilot Enlightenment Voltron out into the cosmos to meet Alien Jesus.

JDCorley posted:

I went the other way from Book of the Dead in my Geist games and made the characters' troubles really really mundane, at least on the surface. And I staged my mini-campaign along the "five stages of grief", one stage per chapter, one major problem themed along that stage per chapter.

That's awesome. I think Sin-Eaters are definitely at their most interesting when their actual problems are pretty mundane/personal and they have to deal with all that drama while thirty dead people are yelling in their ear about the messages they want passed on.

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Androc posted:

It is fun to be special ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Lazy Bear
Feb 1, 2013

Never too lazy to dance with the angels
Man, now I wanna find a Geist game I can let my Silent run around in.

Cool Dad
Jun 15, 2007

It is always Friday night, motherfuckers

My group had a special snowflake player. He was a great guy and he was honestly a great player but pretty much every game we had three grizzled badasses and a teenage girl with some creepy darkness or mind control power set.

Nicolae Carpathia
Nov 7, 2004
I no longer believe in the greater purpose.

Daeren posted:

Despite me having mages be more correct in their assessment of cosmology than some STs (while getting some stuff very wrong), I also love to mess with them in my writing, because they kinda have it coming.

In the vampire game I'm almost done running, the only appearances by mages have involved them going :psypop: at the PCs casually shattering their preconceptions and dealing with things even they were terrified of. In another, an old Changeling game, the standout scene involving mages was when the city's Consilium leaders used a Changeling's contracts to get in direct (heavily, heavily filtered/watered down) contact with the spirit of the Sun, and...well, I summed this up before in an old thread.

So there I was chilling with the Changelings when the Ultimate Sun came out from behind a cloud and said "drat I seen you mages using Life magic to make your dicks bigger, talk about vulgar" and I was like "drat"

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Nicolae Carpathia posted:

So there I was chilling with the Changelings when the Ultimate Sun came out from behind a cloud and said "drat I seen you mages using Life magic to make your dicks bigger, talk about vulgar" and I was like "drat"

Someone actually did a bunch of these and they were the greatest thing since the Iliad one.

Nicolae Carpathia
Nov 7, 2004
I no longer believe in the greater purpose.

Kavak posted:

Someone actually did a bunch of these and they were the greatest thing since the Iliad one.

The Ultimate Hustler is probably one of the top three funniest things to come out of SA, along with the Zybourne Clock and OPEN PALM SLAM.

RandomPauI
Nov 24, 2006


Grimey Drawer
Here's a revised version of The Kreigmariners Canteen

---

Kreigsmariners Canteen - One dot token

In July 1944 the u-boat U-493, the USS Sophie Antonette, and the USS Roland Jones were sunk off the coast of Florida. The u-boat had sunk the Sophie and inflicted a fatal blow on the Roland Jones before being destroyed by the Jones's depth charges. Rescue ships dispatched to the area found no survivors and no traces of the wreckage.

There were actually two survivors: a german sailor named Karl Werk and the Bakelit canteen attached to his belt. Karl was compelled to make his mad dash for safety moments before the death-dealing depth charges hit. The moment he exited the sinking submarine he was snatched by a gigantic hand made of oil, steel, and debris. It smashed Karl onto a nearby beach, sending its component parts everywhere. This hand was controlled by a large fat member of the fae, the Man in the Panama Hat.

Karl was soon putting to work putting metal, human remains, and oil-drenched sand into the pit. Karl wasn't able to survive the week. He and his canteen were tossed into the flames. Somehow the canteen survived. Panama Hat would spend the next fourty years abducting people to clean up the damage done by "the war". It went undiscovered until 198# when Joel found the cantine and drank from it. He began to sweat profously until he was covered in a sheen of oily, salty water. This somehow prevented him from getting burned and blistered while working near and in the firepit (though he still continued to get cuts and bruises). By that point already accustomed fire but he appreciated not feeling his flesh being perpeptrually charred off and regenerated.

The canteen's powers activated with fluids other than salt water. Joel doesn't know that drinking salt-water from the canteen without spending glamour results in a curse.

Ability: The user is protected from fire for the rest of the scene, taking bashing damage instead of lethal damage. Burns and blisters become bumps and bruises. The canteen itself is impervious to fire.

Action: Instant.

Mask: http://www.ebay.com/itm/WW2-GERMAN-BAKELITE-German-WAFFEN-ZZ-DAK-soldiers-field-CANTEEN-BOTTLE-AFRIKA-/111235308896

Mein: The cantain always feels a little bit cold, with some condensation at the bottom. When the canteen is activated the it starts to cry.

Cost: The drinker has to spend one glamour and one willpower to drink the foul looking and smelling salt-water.

Drawback: The drinker spends the rest of the day feeling unnaturally hot, flush, and nausiated (-1 to all rolls until the next sunrise). They also look and smell as if they'd just been swimming in oily water. The drinker can wash off the residue the same day by swimming in the ocean naked or with a successful extended showering or batheing action roll (Strength+Dexterity+Stamina, 10 minutes per action. 4 successes required.)

Catch: The drinkers next night of sleep is spent in a horrible nightmare. They relive the last few days of Karl's life starting with the sinking of the Sophie Antonette and ending once his body is destroyed. No willpower is restored. The drinker will need to make a clarity roll upon waking up.

Tezzor
Jul 29, 2013
Probation
Can't post for 3 years!
Great stuff Ferrinus, I really like the changes to rituals and the ability to make immediate magic more powerful, especially at higher levels, those have always stuck out to me as the biggest problems in the existing system. But I feel like the total reworking of the magic system both in function and in presentation (no more lists of example spells) necessitates a reworking of rotes too. I know listing a ton of example rotes is beyond the scope of what you were trying to do, but some rote rules would probably be beneficial.

Milkfred E. Moore
Aug 27, 2006

'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.'

Kavak posted:

Someone actually did a bunch of these and they were the greatest thing since the Iliad one.

In a Hunter campaign I ran ages ago, I had the PCs become haunted by a a spirit - who was the Ultimate Hustler. He would randomly appear out of everyday objects and give them a sick burn, costing them willpower.

It was pretty great.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Milky Moor posted:

In a Hunter campaign I ran ages ago, I had the PCs become haunted by a a spirit - who was the Ultimate Hustler. He would randomly appear out of everyday objects and give them a sick burn, costing them willpower.

It was pretty great.

Why the hell didn't you post this sooner, tell us some of them!

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Tezzor posted:

Great stuff Ferrinus, I really like the changes to rituals and the ability to make immediate magic more powerful, especially at higher levels, those have always stuck out to me as the biggest problems in the existing system. But I feel like the total reworking of the magic system both in function and in presentation (no more lists of example spells) necessitates a reworking of rotes too. I know listing a ton of example rotes is beyond the scope of what you were trying to do, but some rote rules would probably be beneficial.

Thanks for looking through it. There's a section in rotes in part 2, "spell design" - you think it plus the example rotes in all the Arcanum writeups isn't enough?

Also, is there anything that doesn't make sense or looks stupidly strong/stupidly weak and unrewarding on its face?

Pope Guilty
Nov 6, 2006

The human animal is a beautiful and terrible creature, capable of limitless compassion and unfathomable cruelty.
For a Geist game that never got off the ground I made a murdered union organizer who travels around punishing negligent employers and conducting industrial espionage and sabotage to support worker organizing.

I'm still annoyed that I never got to play The Spectre That is Haunting Europe.

Lazy Bear
Feb 1, 2013

Never too lazy to dance with the angels
I hear ya. Sadly, seems not a lot of people want to play/run Geist, so we're left hoping and waiting.

Zikan
Feb 29, 2004

Are we still doing WoD.flv because here is a changeling and one of his intimacies dealing with a mortal servant of the True Fae

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5ufgkJ-uVE

Kellsterik
Mar 30, 2012
Major Lazer, Warlock of the Iron Gauntlet:
http://vimeo.com/m/5936810

Tezzor
Jul 29, 2013
Probation
Can't post for 3 years!

Ferrinus posted:

Thanks for looking through it. There's a section in rotes in part 2, "spell design" - you think it plus the example rotes in all the Arcanum writeups isn't enough?

Also, is there anything that doesn't make sense or looks stupidly strong/stupidly weak and unrewarding on its face?

I haven't gone through everything in detail, so I'll let you know the answer to that second question, but the benefits and mechanics of rotes (reduced mana cost or paradox, what dicepool they use) need to be spelled out more clearly.

Attorney at Funk
Jun 3, 2008

...the person who says honestly that he despairs is closer to being cured than all those who are not regarded as despairing by themselves or others.

Tezzor posted:

I haven't gone through everything in detail, so I'll let you know the answer to that second question, but the benefits and mechanics of rotes (reduced mana cost or paradox, what dicepool they use) need to be spelled out more clearly.

Where, do you think? I agree it could be better formatted for use as a reference document - my preliminary idea was just trying to include cross-references like a real grown-up wiki would have. But any input on actual layout would be great. Where did you expect to find information on rotes and find none?

For the record, here's the rote mechanic: rotes cost 3xp each, and each one represents a 2 mana discount on the spell you buy it for. This means that sensory and covert rotes are free, while Vulgar rotes cost 1 mana. This is before you apply spell factors or pump the spell with shaping dice.

A rote doesn't have any direct impact on a spell's dicepool, you have to spend mana to shape it normally. (A rote spell can be shaped more easily, of course, because its base cost is cheaper, so you'll want rotes for your go-to attack spells and anything else you plan to cast often or to great effect.) A rote also doesn't have any effect on paradox, as it stands.

INH5
Dec 17, 2012
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Ferrinus posted:

Geist should be a game in which you play as an actual ghost, just one that's been imbued by the power of the Underworld with unusual power and capacity for change. It should be a thing that unless you're expending effort and maybe game resources, the living can't even see or touch you.

My favorite part of the original writeup of ghosts in the original World of Darkness corebook was how horrifying the whole thing was for the ghost, how some of the biggest challenges a ghost could face was getting across even a few words' worth of information to the living.

One problem with that, though, is that people tend to play games to do stuff. So you'd need a pretty elaborate ghost society and/or underworld for players to interact with when they aren't trying desperately to communicate with their grandchildren about the family curse or whatever.

Still, I think this idea could actually work. I can see a lot of interesting things you can do, especially given the ghost rules in the GMC appendix (I'm not too familiar with the original rules). For instance, ghosts regain Essence when somebody remembers or mourns them, so you could have players manipulating important mortals to get them to hold memorial services in order to get more juice.

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Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Tezzor posted:

I haven't gone through everything in detail, so I'll let you know the answer to that second question, but the benefits and mechanics of rotes (reduced mana cost or paradox, what dicepool they use) need to be spelled out more clearly.

I just put this together, hopefully it'll be of use: https://the-act-of-hubris.obsidianportal.com/wikis/spontaneous-spell-casting-cheat-sheet

Edit: Just made an EXTREMELY important edit to that page

Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Dec 16, 2013

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