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JackNapier posted:How can anybody not absolutely love that! That's a quite steep cost for a totem, isn't it? I think my group always picked the cheaper totems so we could spend more points into BRAWLING or SHOOTING. You know, the important stuff.
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Jul 12, 2014 02:32
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citybeatnik posted:I always adore the sheer amount of love the Bone Gnawers get when these threads pop up. Bone Gnawers are awesome. They have a tribal gift, taught to them by the ghost of Elvis, that allows them to stomp the poo poo out of people with the power of magically enhanced square dancing.
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Jul 12, 2014 02:34
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I forgot how great the Pentex book is (thanks for the pointer, Wanderer!). Especially the art in it. This is for the Evil Role-Playing Game Company, fittingly called Black Dog: 
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Jul 12, 2014 02:37
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Of COURSE White Wolf would read Dark Dungeons and decide to work it into their game.
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Jul 12, 2014 02:54
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Stroop There It Is posted:I forgot how great the Pentex book is (thanks for the pointer, Wanderer!). Especially the art in it.
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Jul 12, 2014 03:22
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My god. Thai cuisine? How dark does this setting get?
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Jul 12, 2014 03:29
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The werewolf stuff is awesome, but can we talk more about weresharks? This thread needs more weresharks. Hell, most things need more weresharks.
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Jul 12, 2014 04:07
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Stroth posted:Bone Gnawers are awesome. They have a tribal gift, taught to them by the ghost of Elvis, that allows them to stomp the poo poo out of people with the power of magically enhanced square dancing. This good Goon Sirs! I am  for these stories!
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Jul 12, 2014 04:26
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Arcade Rabbit posted:The werewolf stuff is awesome, but can we talk more about weresharks? This thread needs more weresharks. Hell, most things need more weresharks. Incredibly rare, incredibly ancient and usually homicidally territorial.
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Jul 12, 2014 05:53
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xanthan posted:Bullshit. I refuse to believe this unless I have the book infront of me or someone can back it up. I mean there is insane hoedowns with dueling banjos and the spirit of Elvis, and then there is summoning the General Lee to be your totem. The spirit of the American Dream is the reason that no supernatural creature is able to dominate or control the president of the US.
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Jul 12, 2014 07:08
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bathroomrage posted:At one point my character, a trickstery type(I think the word was Nuwisha?), got the idea put in his head that since everyone's negative outlooks and thoughts were causing the Wyrm(aspect of destruction, Werewolf deals with a trinity) to be insane, maybe if they managed to get everyone across the world to feel positive at once then they could reverse what happened. If there's any song that would save the world, it's Bohemian Rhapsody.
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Jul 12, 2014 08:40
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Ok, let's talk a bit about Rokea, the weresharks. First of all, they are a very old race, sharks have remained unchanged for millions of years, in fact, Rokea were the first changing breed, closely followed by the Mokolé (weredinosaurs/crocs/lizards). They have no lifespan, don't die of old age. They have rage and gnosis and have three auspices determined by the phase of the moon in the moment of their birth, like the Garou. As a consequence of this, the reproductive cycle of Rokea is very slow, it's been faster the last decades because of all the pressure humans have put on them by hunting sharks. They breed with sharks, the union of a Rokea and a shark always produces exactly one wereshark cub, the way it does varies from the shark's race because as you may know, some give birth to live children, others lay eggs. There's a lot of wereshark breeds and it's determined by the mate race, for example if a Rokea mates with a hammerhead shark, the spawn will be a hammerhead wereshark. Rokea don't mate between themselves, never, they just don't have that instinct so they don't even think about it. Sometimes they mate with humans, but it's rare to produce children for the reasons later I will expose. When a young wereshark suffers the first change it's not a traumatic experience like the Garou, it's just a change that amplifies everything. Rokea communicate with each other underwater with the Sending, an emission of electrical impulses (unusable in human form), so usually after the first change they broadcast a message like "What the gently caress is going on?", then either a Rokea shows up and explains everything or a remora (they act like messengers for them) appears and guides the new wereshark to another member of his race to act as a mentor. This trip is called the Long Swim. Rokea have simple laws, Hunt, Spawn, Swim and Survive, being the later the most important of all. They have a predator mindset and act accordingly, but not in a stupid way. The basic social vehicle is the slew, which is a school of 3-7 sharks who travel together, but they always hunt alone. They aren't loners or cold and insensible though, how could they be if they have Rage? They have a similar cosmology to other changing breeds but adapted to the aquatic life. First is the Sea, both in a literal sense and as the name of the Celestine that embodies it. Then there's the Triad of Kun/C'ets/Qyrl which corresponds to Wyld/Weaver/Wyrm, Rokea venerate Kun as their patron mother, very few of them venerates Qyrl (blackmailed to do so is more appropiate). Kun is the patron of fish, C'ets of crustaceans everywhere (including lobsters) and Qyrl of cephalopods and Weresharks are mostly ocean-based and do not try to mix with humans, they just interact with them by sinking their boats and eating them (even though humans provide no nourishment and taste foul) when they gently caress with the sea. Some of their race like to dwell in land, returning to water once in a while (it recharges their gnosis), they are called the Betweeners and are persecuted by some of their oceanic brothers, hunting groups to kill them are sent periodically and it's considered a rite of passage for young rokea to do so. Weresharks that inhabit land permanently far from the sea forsake all their inheritance and gradually lose all their powers and are forgotten by everyone. The Betweeners who inhabit coastal lands are mostly the same than their oceanic brethren, but with a more broad mind and adaptive. The homid appearance is based upon the first humans a wereshark sees, for example if the first humans a Rokea sees are black, it's homid appearance will be permanently of a black male/female. All Rokea homid forms are pretty ugly looking at first. The Betweeners have learned the trick to mold their human forms with practice and can be pretty attractive if they want. For some unexplained reason, during the mid-late 80's all Rokea on land were horny all the time and wanted to mate with humans at every moment, Betweeners have the power to instill desire on humans by looking at them, so they were shagging all the time. That's enough  for now.
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Jul 12, 2014 12:49
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Angry Lobster posted:That's enough WRONG Angry Lobster posted:Weresharks are mostly ocean-based and do not try to mix with humans, they just interact with them by sinking their boats and eating them (even though humans provide no nourishment and taste foul) when they gently caress with the sea. Some of their race like to dwell in land, returning to water once in a while (it recharges their gnosis), they are called the Betweeners and are persecuted by some of their oceanic brothers, hunting groups to kill them are sent periodically and it's considered a rite of passage for young rokea to do so. The Betweener question was a tricky one for the Rokea. On the one hand, Swim is hard to do if you're not in water, on the other, if you take it less literally it can mean 'explore' and there was all that Unsea (land) going unexplored. Previously the Rokea had a policy of 'Unsea don't bother us, we don't bother Unsea', but then the industrial revolution and pollution and whatnot happened so it occurred to some of them that they should start keeping better tabs on these humans. So the majority of the Rokea race got together in an atoll called Turna'a in the 50s to finally hash things out, and 'somehow' managed to miss all the American boats milling about overhead. The six most respected Rokea had just reached a conclusion and were about to share it, when... hands up anyone that can guess what a bunch of American boats in an atoll in the 50s means? Yep. Big badaboom. 60% of the Rokea race were wiped out, and of those it was the most respected, eldest, and authoritative ones that were at the gathering in the first place. There's three auspices for Rokea. Brightwater, the warriors and adventurers. Dimwater, the wanderers and miscellaneous. And Darkwater, the mysics, mediators and philosophers. Brightwater are born on the full moon, Darkwaters on the new moon or eclipses, and everyone else, including those born during the day, are Dimwater - hence why their role is so nebulous and vague. And only one Darkwater got out of Turna'a alive, which is probably a big part of why thinks went straight to poo poo. An 'unknown' Dimwater elder sends out a message through Sharknet (remora messengers) - stay off the land, because we say so. The Brightwaters immediate reply is 'who the gently caress made you boss'. They exchange hate mail by fish for a while, but nothing happens. Then, thirteen years after Turna'a another 'unknown' Dimwater sends out a message - there's this Betweener on the land here, go get him. So a pack forms, go onto land, drag him into the water... and just stare at each other and realize they hadn't thought this through too well. With a lot of metaphorical shuffling of feet they let him go in the water and, surprise surprise, the Betweener heads straight back to land. This goes on for a while, to what I can only assume is the amusement of all, and then said 'unknown' Dimwater sends out another message - start killing the Betweeners. If you've been following these loreposts you can probably see where I'm going with this whole 'unknown' business. Wyrm did it. Or rather, Wyrm's underwater avatar, Qyrl. For a while, peace was maintained because Betweeners would just pop back into the ocean every now and then long enough to send out a few fishmails and act like they were always underwater. Then in the 80s Qyrl starts blackmailing the Betweeners - swear fealty to me or I'll dob you in to the Dimwaters. A lot of them tell Qyrl to shove it, and sure enough the Dimwater packs start going search-and-destroy. Hunting on Unsea becomes a rite of passage, and where there's no handy Betweeners they hunt humans, Rokea kinfolk (called Kadugo, a Tagalog word for blood relation - lot of Rokea stuff comes from Pacific island cultures) or other changing breeds. It's pretty hosed up. Re: Kadugo - things work different for Rokea than they do for Garou. A wereshark and a shark produce a wereshark. A wereshark and a human produce a Kadugo, never a wereshark. A wereshark and a Kadugo can produce a wereshark. But, outside of the Beast Courts of Asia (which are a whole other can of worms) that hasn't happened until the 'now' in canon. The Rokea book is told from the point of view of the first human-born Rokea, and the end of the book suggest three different fates for him. But with Betweeners having been wandering around in large numbers for two generations now, and as Angry Lobster says they've been shagging their brains out the entire time, so there's gonna be others, which leaves a big ol' plot point for players to have a poke at.
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Jul 12, 2014 14:45
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Angry Lobster posted:Weresharks....have the power to instill desire on humans by looking at them, so they were shagging all the time. World of Darkness: To Catch a Wereshark Predator
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Jul 12, 2014 14:51
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Tehan posted:The Rokea book is told from the point of view of the first human-born Rokea, and the end of the book suggest three different fates for him. This type of thing is one of my favorite parts about WoD sourcebooks. I recently skimmed through Clanbook Tzimisce and the chapter that talks about modern Tzimisce practices, structures, hierarchies, etc. is in the form of a younger(ish) Tzimisce writing a letter to a recently reawoken Methuselah. The younger Tzimisce also sends his childe to serve the Methuselah as an aid. The final part of the chapter talks about interesting uses for their clan Disciplines, and is written as the Methuselah's response. His response is to chastise his descendent for not giving humans enough credit, for not giving his own childe enough credit, and for his rude and familiar ways of addressing the Methuselah. Clanbook Tzimisce posted:... But such is the extent of my generosity with others. I shall be far less generous with you. You treated me contemptibly as well and wrote in such familiar tones. Do you think this is my first time to awaken from a long sleep? For this shabby treatment, I keep your childe. Next time, I will feed you to it piece by piece. Those who suffer undeath after my Blood should treat me well. Then it goes into the ways that Tzimisce can use their Disciplines to their advantage, Tzimisce-specific techniques, etc. 
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Jul 12, 2014 16:16
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That is an amazing way to write clanbooks. It also reminded me why vampires are still my favorite of the WW creations. They're still close to humanity but can be so, so incredibly hosed up.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:28
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Dante Logos posted:Does anyone know anything about some of the more famous Wraiths? Like the First Wraith Abel? Charon is definitely the most famous wraith. He was the first and the only Emperor of Stygia. He died some time around 1400 BC in Mycenae. In the Shadowlands, he was approached by the Lady of the Fate, who gave him a task of ferrying the dead to their final destination - Transcendence. He did that, having many heroic adventures in the process, but the sheer amount of passengers soon started to overwhelm him. He started to teach other wraiths how to build boats and pole the Sunless Sea. They were badasses who protected the dead and fought the Oblivion - which is a semi-sentient force of entropy, which may also be the Wyrm. As their number grew, the Ferryment begun to specialize. Some went out to explore the Sunless Sea and returned, regaling the wraiths with the tales of numerous paradises awaiting for them. They called themselves the Shining Ones. Charon, in the meantime, became enamored with the Roman Republic and begun organizing another one called Stygia to better process and handle the tide of wraiths. He built a great city, using relic parts from many famous metropolises destroyed throughout the ages. Around this time, he also rescued the Artificer named Nhudri who taught him soulforging - the process of making useful things out of wraith "body" (which is called corpus). While it destroyed the wraith, it also ensured he never becomes eaten by the Oblivion. Everything went to poo poo around 476 AD. When the Rome fell, the Labirynth - the part of the Lower Umbra most close to the Oblivion - shook and released a horde of Spectres, who promptly attacked Stygia alongside dead barbarians. They caused great destruction, both in the city and areas outside, before being repelled by Charon and the Ferrymen. Many wraiths were destroyed by the storm - the First Great Maelstrom - that accompanied the Spectres. The republic was nearly destroyed. This was a turning point for Charon. Vowing to never let this happen again, he declared himself the Emperor. This made the Ferrymen really upset - the setting doesn't make it clear if they abandoned Stygia or were banished by their former mentor after voicing their concerns. The new ruler set up a hierarchy - well, the Hierarchy - governing his nascent Empire, led by seven Deathlords. Each of them had a legion under their command, made of wraiths who died of a specific cause. For example, the Smiling Lord was given victims of violence who formed the Grim Legion, the Ashen Lady and her Iron Legion commanded the victims of old age, etc. Another important thing that happened during this time was establishing Dictum Mortuum - a strict code of laws. Most notably, it forbid wraiths any contacts with the living under threat of discorporation. The Empire very quickly started to degenerate into feudal monarchy, mirroring the living world. Charon still let the souls of Stygia depart to the paradises in Far Shores, but heavily taxed the Shining Ones who oversaw the process. Fortunately, he also made his Empire work like a well-oiled machine. When the Second Great Maelstrom came with the wake of Black Death, the invasion of Spectres was easily repelled. Unfortunately, the situation inside the city detoriated. The archbishop of the Fishers, an organization of Christian wraiths and Shining Ones, demanded Charon to reduce the fee they have to pay. Charon, nonplussed, disbanded their military arm and doubled the fee. Predictably, they rebelled against him and were betrayed by a traitor in their midst. The forces of the Empire sacked their temple and found out they had been defrauding their ruler for many years, keeping the most valuable treasures and artifacts for themselves. Enraged Charon sent some of his trusted Knights to the Far Shores to have a stern talk with the Shining Ones there. As for the ones in the city, they were all banished. It went worse - the Knights returned and reported what they saw. The souls in the Far Shores never reached Transcendence, instead being trapped in heavens and hells by power-hungry Shining Ones. Charon declared that Transcendence is a lie and branded everyone seeking it as a Heretic. From now on, the only purpose of the Empire was resisting the Oblivion. A secret police - Order of the Unlidded Eye was created to root out the Heretic influences. The wraith Guilds liked their ruler less and less and finally tried to seize power, which got them disbanded and their responsibilities transferred to the Legions. Around that time, Heretics and Renegades destroyed the entire Dark Kingdom of Obsidian which caused the Third Great Maelstrom - so intense that it separated Stygia from the Shadowlands and changed the relatively calm Sunless Sea into something that could only be named "the Tempest". The barrier between the lands of dead and the living became much thicker than before. Charon was forced to ramp up processing of wraiths, soulforging the most useless ones and enslaving a great amount of the rest. He also set up colonies in the Shadowlands called the Necropoli, mostly situated in abandoned and ran down parts of cities. They were pretty much allowed to operate in their own way, provided they enforce Dictum Mortuum and send a tithe of thralls and relics to Stygia. Then something strange happened - both Charon and their Deathlords become unable to travel to Shadowlands. Their Fetters - items that had a meaning to them in life and acted as an anchor to the world of living - got found and destroyed. Some blamed the Spectres, others - power-hungry Deathlords. Some ghostly conspiracy theories suggested that Charon himself, finding himself unable to travel beyond Stygia for long, decided to retaliate against his underlings. Nevertheless, this made the Necropoli even more autonomous than they were. They managed to survive the Fourth Great Maelstrom brought by the Great War - mostly by huddling in their citadels. Hierarchy decayed even more. Finally, the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused the last Great Maelstrom, even worse than all the previous ones. It made travel from and to Stygia completely impossible. The storm brought even more Spectres than before. Finally, from the Tempest came a beast named Gorool - a beast big enough that could swallow the entire city of Stygia. Charon, sensing that it's over, left his mask in the throne room, retrieved his blade and the cowled robe, took a single ship and went fighting the beast alone. Being unable to defeat it, he opened a whirlpool in the center of the Sunless Sea that swallowed both Gorool and him. He was never seen again - at least, not until the Ends of the Empire, after which the setting was discontinued.
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Jul 12, 2014 17:24
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I'm going to try and revive the thread the best way I know how. Magical Tehan ball, consult a splatbook of your choosing and give us more Werewolf goodness!
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Jul 12, 2014 23:13
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Gantolandon posted:Wraith Stuff drat, I didn't realise the afterlife in oWod was so crazy.
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Jul 13, 2014 00:06
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Someone should do a write up on the Technocracy and how they are the only good guys in the entire WoD.
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Jul 13, 2014 00:09
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King Doom posted:Someone should do a write up on the Technocracy and how they are the only good guys in the entire WoD.
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Jul 13, 2014 00:17
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King Doom posted:Someone should do a write up on the Technocracy and how they are the only good guys in the entire WoD. But aren't they slowly killing magic? Also the last update was on page 61. This both the best derail ever and the longest I've seen that didn't end in a ban or locked thread.
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Jul 13, 2014 00:51
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Was that Methuselah of the Old Clan with... Dominate was it, instead of Vicissitude? They certainly got the noble attitude. Technocracy has at least some foundation in "stabilizing" the world, and probably also for dealing with rampart Mages such as Nephandi and Marauders - servants of Abyss and insane Mages who manifest any Paradox in their environment instead of being slapped, somewhat like Witches in Puella Magi, respectively. At some point it started taking proactive approach with "Reality Deviants" which includes any Mage anywhere. There's the central conflict titled as Reality War or somesuch, don't recall the exact term. It's also full of internal politics, which caused at least Virtual Adepts and Sons of Ether to switch sides.
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Jul 13, 2014 00:57
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xanthan posted:But aren't they slowly killing magic? Only because they are replacing old system with a new one that allows everyone to use magic. Present tense. Cell phones are magical devices that work for everyone because everyone agrees that electronics should allow cell phones to work.
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Jul 13, 2014 01:19
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xanthan posted:But aren't they slowly killing magic? Hoo boy. See, the thing about Technocrats is that they are very much not inherently wrong about their ideals. A lot of magic is what happens when you give a crazy guy a nuke, and unlimited time to figure it out. Their ideal world is a perfectly objective one, where it doesn't matter what humanity thinks, there is only one truth and one concept of reality. In other words, the real world, where anti-vaxxers are simply paranoid morons and where reliable cancer treatments may one day be found, to use the Progenitors' favorite analogy (in fact, the whole anti-vaccination and homeopathy movement is why said Progenitors loathe the Traditions, since they include the Verbena and faith healers in general). Thing is, the main problem of the Technocracy can't spot its own flaws. Iteration X can't account for human emotions to save its life, the New World Order has its head so far up its rear end it regards proofreading its own plans as demeaning, the Progentiors, as mentioned, are a wee bit trigger-happy with the Progroms instead of doing their actual job of treating illness, the Syndicate is filled with the kind of people who think Bitcoin was a good plan, and the Void Engineers...actually, the Void Engineers are the exception to the Technocratic rule of "has never heard of a mirror", but has its hands way too full in order to actually do anything productive. So, yes, they're slowly killing magic (or more accurately, magic that looks like magic instead of being technology). If they actually had a coherent plan for what they would put in its place, this would not be a bad thing. At all. EDIT: Which is not to say the Traditions aren't blind to their own flaws, mind. The whole "supportive of a crazy guy with a nuke and unlimited time to figure it out" issue is part of the reason why the Technocrats are the real heroes of the setting. It's just that, after the Avatar Storm, the lack of the more bullheaded Tradition bosses, trapped in the Umbra, allowed the ones on Earth to find a clue. A large portion of the Technocracy is largely crossing its fingers and praying Control comes back sooner or later (Spoiler Alert: It can't). Erebro fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Jul 13, 2014 |
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Jul 13, 2014 01:26
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JackNapier posted:I agree! Wonderful WoD Goon Sirs, tell us about the Technocracy Back in the day, there was a quasi-magical tradition called the Order of Reason, which used high-end mechanical "sorcery"; you had members of it running around with miniguns during the Renaissance. In the same period, members of more mystical traditions were, to put it charitably, out of control. The world was a frightening, dark place, with vampires ruling big parts of Europe with an iron fist, werewolves killing people left and right, and the mystics were no strangers to human sacrifice and death magic. If you were a normal person, you were emphatically screwed from birth, one way or another. Now, remember that magick in the WoD works on a matter of consensus reality: if a lot of people believe something to be true, it is now true. The Order of Reason exploited this to raise the general level of technology available to an ordinary human being, which also increased their ability to defend themselves. The technological bell curve goes up from there, slowly but surely, until their paradigm began to supplant that of the mystics. The Order of Reason slowly became the modern Technocracy, which sees its role in the world as protective; they're the secretive organization out to protect normal workaday humanity from the multiple supernatural threats that are coming from all sides. Vampire, werewolf, mage (a.k.a. "reality deviant"), spirit, zombie, whatever: they'll throw heavily-armed Men in Black and cyborgs and death satellites and whatever else you want at it until it stops moving. In the original version of Mage, the modern Technocracy is a faceless, often cruel bureaucracy that ruthlessly stamps out opposition wherever it's found, for no other reason than that it's a threat to their paradigm. The goal of the Technocracy is complete dominance over humanity: no religion, no mysticism or imagination at all, just pure mechanical perfection. It's not until second edition that the writers on Mage began to slowly admit that the Technocracy, in its way, has a point. Most of the supernatural creatures in the World of Darkness view humans as, at best, a prey species; vampires drink blood, changelings siphon off artistic inspiration, wraiths drain Passion, and werewolves run the gamut from mass murder to cannibalism to abducting unsuspecting humans who happen to bear the werewolf gene in order to turn them into brood stock. This culminated in the Player's Guide to the Technocracy, which detailed how to run a complete campaign with players as Technocrats. There are five Technocratic "traditions," which represent the major schools of thought within the larger whole: * Iteration X, an organization of transhumanists that specialize in cybernetic augmentation, big gently caress-off robots, and giant guns. As a trade-off, they are completely unable to recognize the existence of spirits or the spirit realm at all. * The New World Order, the "cops" of the Technocracy and the ones that a mystic are most likely to run into. They're all about information control and have a theoretically infinite number of "Men in Black"--cloned soldiers--to throw at a problem. * Progenitors, which specialize in biological manipulation: clones, mutants, new species, new diseases, you name it. Better living through aggressive bioengineering. * The Syndicate. You know the plutomancers from Unknown Armies? Those guys. The Syndicate specializes in societal engineering through control of high finance and currency. They bankroll the Technocracy. If a Technocratic organization can't overcome a bunch of mages through force of arms, they'll slash their credit rating and get their house condemned. * The Void Engineers, which are the Technocracy's first and only line of defense between Earth and the various unpleasant things that are not on Earth. They explore the universe, tend to run into a lot of Things That Should Not Be Named, and are typically the least hostile towards other supernaturals of any Technocratic faction. A Void Engineer's usually just happy you're human. Two Traditions also defected from the Technocracy: the Sons of Ether, the mad scientists of the line, had an ideological split from the Technocracy over the existence of ether/phlogiston (it was eliminated from consensus reality as sort of a gently caress-you to the Sons, who were bad about toeing the party line, and that was the last straw), and the Virtual Adepts began as an organization called the Difference Engineers, but left the Technocracy in the '50s. Long story short on that: information wants to be free. (Fun Mage cosmology fact: when you get beyond the orbit of Mars or so, you're effectively in a new Umbra where the typical rules don't apply. There's no paradigm so there's no Paradox and things get crazy. One facet of this is that, since the Technocrats decided to outlaw the existence of Ether two hundred years ago, they believe that space is largely made up of hard vacuum. Traditionalist mages are not subject to the issue and can breathe ether without too much of a problem. If you get on a Technocrat spaceship and throw a Technocrat out an airlock without a space suit, anyone who survives isn't a Technocrat any longer.) The idea behind the Technocracy in second edition Mage is that they're one half of a magickal cold war. Each of the nine main Traditions, in their way, represent a major school of mystical thought in the human condition: the exploration of the mind, altered states, religion, imagination, sex, death, you name it. Eliminating them would, in a very real way, require that you eliminate the concepts that power them from the human race; if you want to get rid of the Celestial Chorus, for example, you better figure out a way to turn the entire human race into die-hard atheists. Every Tradition has its own little ideological foxhole that isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and at the same time, they wouldn't want to eliminate a base level of technology from the human race even if they could. (Even the most die-hard Order of Hermes mage, who would turn the clock back to 1400 in a loving heartbeat if it meant he got to have his own feudal-system castle with serfs and everything, probably enjoys having access to indoor plumbing.) It's a stalemate. (This is something they completely missed the loving boat on in Mage Revised, when the Technocracy "won," by the way, and it's one of the reasons why I can't loving stand Mage Revised.) While this erupts into violence from time to time, the Ascension War is basically a cold war, fought over individual beliefs. The Technocracy, however, spends an amazing amount of its effort on quashing the supernatural because part of its mission statement has always been that the Sleepers, the vast mass of ordinary humans, must be protected. The Traditions will gently caress up a demon or a corrupt mage if they find one, but for the most part, it's a neutral organization. As such, they're one of the single largest and most powerful "good" factions in the World of Darkness; they give humans the tools they need to stay alive and healthy, and in an indirect way, the tools to defend themselves against supernatural threats. It's simply that the rest of the game line is about playing one of those threats. This isn't to say that the Technocracy is wholly good, however. You may have spotted some of the problems already, but in short: * The Technocracy's name is the first sign of the biggest problem. In a technocratic society, humans begin to act more like machines. You don't sleep; you drink caffeine until you collapse. You don't give yourself time to heal; you just push through it or "fix" yourself with drugs. You don't pursue hobbies, you don't have beliefs, and at the higher end of the scale, you don't even have emotions. In a theoretical future where the Technocracy won everything, Earth would look like the inside of a gray Swiss watch forever. * They are basically infested with the Weaver. The Wyrm/Weaver/Wyld triat is still very much a part of the Mage cosmology and Technocrats could not be more suited to the Weaver's goals if they tried. This would not be a problem if the Weaver was not bugfuck insane and/or the Wyrm was not imprisoned and also insane. As such, the Technocrats may not be on the wrong side spiritually, but they sure as hell aren't on the right one. If they win, it's just as much an endgame for local reality as if the Wyrm wins, because it would irrevocably upset the balance. * The Technocratic paradigm in general has a real hard time with anything that doesn't fit into its philosophy. * The Void Engineers have a really, really bad habit of coming back from space Wrong. There are a lot of terrible things in deep space, beyond the Technocracy's effective reach, and the leading cause of death among Void Engineers is running into some Lovecraftian nightmare while they're off the edge of the map. * Iteration X in general is hosed. The heart of their power is a pocket dimension called Autocthonia, where their leader hangs out. That leader is an autonomous AI called the Computer that gives them their marching orders, because it represents the endgoal of their particular paradigm: perfect emotionless intellect. Because Iteration X as a whole doesn't know Spirit magick at all, even the hosed-up variant that Technocrats practice (I think they call it Dimensional Science), they aren't able to tell that the Computer isn't an AI at all. It's some massive spirit of intellect with a goal of its own, and the higher-up you get in the Iteration X philosophy, the less able you are to resist its influence. This is not something anybody knows, because if you had the wherewithal to spot the Computer as a fraud, you'd be of a sufficiently different frame of mind that you wouldn't be able to use magick in Autocthonia. This means that a bunch of partial to full-conversion magickal cyborgs with guns the size of God are taking orders from a completely inhuman machine intelligence and are incapable of discovering the deceit on their own. The Technocracy has problems, but in the World of Darkness, it is maybe the only major supernatural organization that is specifically dedicated to the protection of humanity. It may do this through the abject control of humanity, but it's still trying, goddammit.
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Jul 13, 2014 01:44
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Wanderer posted:* The Technocracy's name is the first sign of the biggest problem. In a technocratic society, humans begin to act more like machines. You don't sleep; you drink caffeine until you collapse. You don't give yourself time to heal; you just push through it or "fix" yourself with drugs. You don't pursue hobbies, you don't have beliefs, and at the higher end of the scale, you don't even have emotions. In a theoretical future where the Technocracy won everything, Earth would look like the inside of a gray Swiss watch forever. * The Syndicate is corrupt as gently caress and made of people who make Gordon Gekko look moderate. What makes the matters worse, one of their Methodologies, Special Projects Division, is in bed with Pentex, actively helping the corporation and developing weapons powered by Banes.
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Jul 13, 2014 02:32
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JackNapier posted:I'm going to try and revive the thread the best way I know how. Magical Tehan ball, consult a splatbook of your choosing and give us more Werewolf goodness! There is a being called the Ananasa, that claims to have split off from the Weaver during prehistory, when Weaver wanted a child of it's own instead of constantly mucking about with Wyld's children. I don't trust what this being says, since it seems like a Mary Sue fanfiction of the Triat where Ananasa is the most reasonable, special and beloved character in the story. But according to it Weaver was always a spiteful, selfish bitch. It declared war on Wyld for always messing up Weaver's perfect stasis. When Wyld made the Mokole (weredinosaurs) and the Rokea (weresharks), Weaver immediately responded by making wereinsects of every flavour it could get it's hands on - and then when the weremoths (yes, weremoths) refused to swear fealty to Weaver, Weaver destroyed them. Wyrm flipped out at this and they fought for a while, but apparently Wyrm also got a raging boner for Weaver from seeing Weaver do Wyrm's thing, so he made a move after the fighting tapered off. Weaver went along with it, and then when Wyrm went to get jiggy with Weaver, Weaver instead trapped Wyrm in it's webs, bringing Ananasa's fanfiction in line with the other werecritter mythologies. Ananasa, if the name hasn't tipped you off already, is a spider goddess, and queen of the werespiders, the Ananasi. Ananasa claims that she created the Ananasi out of the energies of the Weaver, Wyld and Wyrm combined, with the awestruck approval of all parties, which is so out of character it has to be deliberately so. Their task, as given by Ananasa, is to embody the Triat as it should be, or as Ananasa thinks it should be. And they obey, under pain of... well, pain. For all the 'you are my children and I love you' she goes on about, there's a lot of explicit threats of fates far worse than death thrown around. And for a being that claims to have the inside scoop on all things Weaver and what's happened to upset the balance, the Technocracy is not mentioned at all and Mages are barely given a passing nod. The Breedbook for the Ananasi is one of my favourite examples of White Wolf writing done right, because it uses an unreliable narrator to beautifully illustrate the inner workings of a mystical werespider dictatorship. The same lines that cement the protagonists of the book into their new places in the cult highlight to the reader how cult-like it really is. The Ananasi are interesting themselves, too. Instead of the Rage most other changing breeds have, they use blood to fuel their powers, like a vampire. They have a number of nifty insect-related gifts, from summoning a bunch of them and commanding them to absorbing them to heal wounds. They can spin webs out of blood to create a safe haven, arrest a fall, or of strength enough to snare a commercial jet out of mid-air, or durability enough to build permanent structures. And uniquely, some of them can summon Paradox spirits and sic them on mages who have racked up some Paradox but yet to draw the attentions of said spirits. And while three of their forms fit the usual template for werecritters, being human/spider-human murderbeast/giant spider, their fourth form is pretty drat unique - they melt into thousands of regular-sized spiders. If they're cornered, they can just melt into a thousand spiders, jam their memories and sense of self in ten or so, and have those ten bolt for safety while the rest form a rearguard. Worst case scenario, they can build themselves up from as little as one spider by eating their way through insects, or if they feel like taking a shortcut, finding a helpless person, boring into their ear, eating their brain, and then consuming the entire person from the inside out, effectively body-snatching them and enjoying a whole new lease on life as a brand-new person.
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Jul 13, 2014 02:58
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I was gonna make a big effortpost about Nuwisha, but I lost the splatbook and I can't find it.  :So instead have a few bullet points!* -They used to be the teachers and secret-keepers of the Garou until the whole "oh hey let's murder the Changing Breeds" thing went down. While everyone was running around getting murdered by big, dumb werewolves, Coyote caught what was happening halfway through and told all his kids to  . They ended up hiding out in the Umbra(spirit world), and now there is very tight regulation around how many Nuwisha are allowed to wander the physical realm; Coyote can't stand losing another, but he's decided to go gently caress off in an even DEEPER part of the Umbra because, well, Coyote I guess.-Speaking of the Looney Toons thing, there are an awful lot of silly pictures strewn throughout the Nuwisha splatbook depicting all sorts of cartoon nonsense. A lot of the powers also match up with this; like an extremely cheap one called Xochipilli's Curse. What this does is... Well, it gives the target 'catastrophically bad luck' if you touch them, or 'miraculously good luck'. What this does is up to the Storyteller, but it's encouraged to be ironic, it's also free if you use it to teach someone a lesson! -As was previously mentioned, Humor replaces Honour for Nuwisha; they don't care nearly so much about combat and in fact, because Coyote pissed off Luna(the moon), they can't even access Rage without a special gift! This is a humongous detriment in combat, as Rage is almost entirely why Werecritters are so hideously OP, on the other hand, Nuwisha don't care about silver(or gold) and have a slew of powers to gently caress with or otherwise seal away Rage. -Speaking of which, one of your powers can make an opponent so ridiculously happy that all they can do is party down right there on the spot as long as you party with them! -Every Nuwisha is encouraged(but not forced) to pick an aspect of Coyote, that is The Trickster, to follow. I don't remember all of them, but they have their own perks and benefits while requiring you to act a certain way. For example, Xochipilli will let you survive any ludicrously, ridiculously, action-movie-style deadly situation as long as you put yourself at risk whenever you get the chance. Raven(what I chose) requires you to keep no wealth in any form and trust solely in him to provide. On the upside, Raven also grants easier relations with Corax(the information brokering bird people of the Sun) and of course, covers your needs for food and shelter. -Then again, Coyote is also the lord of creation and destruction, and as a result you can ask for him to howl and utterly destroy a single target via natural disaster, no getting out of it as long as it's a threat not only to Garou, but the Nuwisha. Coyote himself also has to tell you it's cool. *May or may not be entirely accurate, as it's from memory. Kobold eBooks fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Jul 13, 2014 |
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Jul 13, 2014 03:13
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Erebro posted:So, yes, they're slowly killing magic (or more accurately, magic that looks like magic instead of being technology). The world operates on the power of belief and if enough people believe something, then it's true. Doesn't matter what it is. So back in the middle ages the Technocracy convinced enough people that the world operates on an understandable and observable set of rules to create a self perpetuating cycle. Which caused the Renaissance and everything that came after. And since everyone believes in it, then everyone can use the magic that system creates: technology. Gantolandon posted:* The Syndicate is corrupt as gently caress and made of people who make Gordon Gekko look moderate. What makes the matters worse, one of their Methodologies, Special Projects Division, is in bed with Pentex, actively helping the corporation and developing weapons powered by Banes. Stroth fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Jul 13, 2014 |
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Jul 13, 2014 03:13
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GuyUpNorth posted:Was that Methuselah of the Old Clan with... Dominate was it, instead of Vicissitude? They certainly got the noble attitude. You'd think so based on age alone. The Old Clan do use Dominate instead, yes, but this one appears not to. He only mentions the baseline clan Disciplines, and his outlook on Vicissitude is positive. So, I guess not. He also describes old Tzimisce using the Auspex discipline Astral Projection to duel each other in the spirit world, which I think is pretty cool.
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Jul 13, 2014 05:22
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Wanderer posted:* Iteration X in general is hosed. The heart of their power is a pocket dimension called Autocthonia, where their leader hangs out. That leader is an autonomous AI called the Computer that gives them their marching orders, because it represents the endgoal of their particular paradigm: perfect emotionless intellect. Because Iteration X as a whole doesn't know Spirit magick at all, even the hosed-up variant that Technocrats practice (I think they call it Dimensional Science), they aren't able to tell that the Computer isn't an AI at all. It's some massive spirit of intellect with a goal of its own, and the higher-up you get in the Iteration X philosophy, the less able you are to resist its influence. This is not something anybody knows, because if you had the wherewithal to spot the Computer as a fraud, you'd be of a sufficiently different frame of mind that you wouldn't be able to use magick in Autocthonia. This means that a bunch of partial to full-conversion magickal cyborgs with guns the size of God are taking orders from a completely inhuman machine intelligence and are incapable of discovering the deceit on their own. I take it this is where they got their inspiration for the God-Machine in NWoD?
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Jul 13, 2014 17:12
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So what, the Tremere feeling that their magic is starting to fail is simply technocracy taking over, tremere magic can no longer compete with the dominance of technology?
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Jul 13, 2014 17:22
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bathroomrage posted:and now there is very tight regulation around how many Nuwisha are allowed to wander the physical realm drat near all the Changing Breeds pull some malarkey to hide their true numbers and think they're the cleverest fucks for doing so. The werespiders constantly have half or more of their members just chillin' in their thousands of spiders form, each of them spread out around their own square mile or so of wilderness. The werewolves have their tribes all inhabiting different niches, as well as a surprisingly huge amount of hobowolves that don't give a poo poo about fighting the Wyrm day to day but will come out of the woodwork when poo poo hits the fan for a murderwolf bumrush. The werebears and weredinosaurs lay really low because they got wiped out by the loving Garou once and they're not keen on an encore. The weresharks stay off land for the most part, so drat near nobody on land has any idea of their true numbers. Wererats have huge underground nests, where a little space goes a long way since, y'know, they can be rat-sized. Have we covered wererats? Known as Ratkin, they're insane bastards that would scoff at Tyler Durden for not going far enough. Their only allegiance is to Wyld, and they're as brutally opposed to the Weaver and Wyrm as Garou are to just the Wyrm, as well as being opposed to humanity and civilization. Instead of mating with kinfolk and hoping that the offspring is another Ratkin - most Changing Breeds are limited to this, and have about a one-in-ten chance of a shapeshifter child when mating with kinfolk - they can infect their kinfolk with the 'Birthing Plague', a nasty disease that has about a 90% mortality rate, but surviving kinfolk become Ratkin. Combine with reproduction rate of rats and you've got a recipe for instant population explosion. Edit: double nine posted:So what, the Tremere feeling that their magic is starting to fail is simply technocracy taking over, tremere magic can no longer compete with the dominance of technology? My understanding is that Tremere magic is more vampiric than Mage-ish in nature, so it's more resistant to the Technocratic meddling. But I might be wrong, I'm not that solid on the Mage side of things. Tehan fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Jul 13, 2014 |
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Jul 13, 2014 17:29
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No, you're correct. The Tremere gave up their Avatars in exchange for "immortality". Tremere Magic is just a vampiric discipline. It pales in comparison to real Magic, but it doesn't fail or suffer Paradox.
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Jul 13, 2014 18:08
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Tehan posted:My understanding is that Tremere magic is more vampiric than Mage-ish in nature, so it's more resistant to the Technocratic meddling. But I might be wrong, I'm not that solid on the Mage side of things. A vampire's soul waits in Hell for when their consciousness eventually arrives. Since the Avatar and the soul are one and the same, vampires cannot access their imprisoned Avatars and therefore cannot use magic. Tremere vampires have learned to use their supernatural control over blood to do things that resemble magic, known as Thaumaturgy, but it's a poor man's substitute. On the plus side, it means that it's as resistant to Paradox and consensual reality as other vampiric abilities.
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Jul 13, 2014 18:16
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:A vampire's soul waits in Hell for when their consciousness eventually arrives. Since the Avatar and the soul are one and the same, vampires cannot access their imprisoned Avatars and therefore cannot use magic. Tremere vampires have learned to use their supernatural control over blood to do things that resemble magic, known as Thaumaturgy, but it's a poor man's substitute. On the plus side, it means that it's as resistant to Paradox and consensual reality as other vampiric abilities. Except that I thought that tremere magic was starting to fail in ways similar to when they were still human mages. Or is that the doing of whatever antidelluvian is currently inhabiting Tremere's body.
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Jul 13, 2014 18:18
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One of the things about the old WoD that was kind of fun to watch in the second and third editions was how they realized crossovers weren't a great idea, if for no other reason than game balance. As such, it's usually not a great idea to assume that anything from one line is causing problems in another unless it's explicitly stated to be doing so, i.e. the Technocracy's involvement in the death of the Ravnos antediluvian. The Tremere's sorcery fading out is easy enough to attribute to Gehenna. Dante Logos posted:I take it this is where they got their inspiration for the God-Machine in NWoD? It's not like this is the only place you can go to find an example of people being guided by a massive machine intelligence. The moment I typed that about Iteration X, I was expecting about a thousand jokes about Paranoia.
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Jul 13, 2014 18:43
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Tehan posted:My understanding is that Tremere magic is more vampiric than Mage-ish in nature, so it's more resistant to the Technocratic meddling. But I might be wrong, I'm not that solid on the Mage side of things. Correct. The Embrace either destroys or heavily modifies the Avatar, which becomes unable to alter reality. Tremere, as all other vampires, practice hedge or static magic - they work inside a static paradigm that hasn't been wiped out by the Technocracy yet.
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Jul 13, 2014 18:53
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The pre-vamp Tremere magic failing predates the formal Order of Reason by a few centuries, but it could just be the proto-paradigm of magic-as-technology starting to coalesce. Given that their own paradigm is based on the concept of angels and the like (in a very rough sketch) it could also be attributed to Lucifer's actions to sweep the angels/demons under the rug and deny them faith/power--by sidelining them he's undermining the Order of Hermes to an extent. Of course, the REAL reason is that it just sounded good as a story hook and they furiously wrote around it without actually retconning it away. The current concerns over Thaumaturgy failing can probably be laid squarely on the Withering, the general failure of Vitae during Gehenna. Magic powered by vampire blood doesn't do so hot when the blood's power fades.
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Jul 13, 2014 19:03
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