|
Tehan posted:Wonderful Werewolf
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 19:45
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 29, 2024 17:17 |
|
|
Wanderer posted: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. One of the nice things about the nWoD is they went through pretty great pains to make the world more cohesive and for crossovers to be less awkward, at least mechanically. No more turning Elder vampires into lawnchairs with a starter Mage PC.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 19:47
|
|
|
LeJackal posted:One of the nice things about the nWoD is they went through pretty great pains to make the world more cohesive and for crossovers to be less awkward, at least mechanically. That's arguable. Especially since they mostly did it by gimping the hell out of most of the systems and it's still incredibly broken anyway.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 19:55
|
|
|
Stroth posted:That's arguable. Especially since they mostly did it by gimping the hell out of most of the systems and it's still incredibly broken anyway. How do you mean?
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 20:01
|
|
|
Wait, isn't Autochthonia from Exalted?
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 20:20
|
|
|
Tehan posted:
I'm surprised the wererats are opposed to the weaver and civilisation considering how much rats are traditionally associated with cities. In fact, if i had tried to guess what changing breeds were most likely to be primarily urban, I would have guessed wererats and werepigeons. Actually, do werepigeons exist?
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 20:22
|
|
|
xanthan posted:Wait, isn't Autochthonia from Exalted? The whole "Exalted as backstory to the World of Darkness" thing is a huge  that is interesting and divisive. Apparently. I don't see the problem with it.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 20:30
|
|
|
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. That said, it is quite possible for a Mage to develop disciplines by drinking vampire blood. It's also possible (by using some hosed-up dark magic) to become a werewolf. There was a character in 2nd Edition who managed to pull all of that off and became the most absolutely ridiculous character that WW ever published. Eventually, sanity took over in the writing room and a group of heavies from the Mage and Werewolf game systems got together to wipe him out. Oh 2nd Ed, you were so crazy. 
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 20:43
|
|
|
Zeroisanumber posted:That said, it is quite possible for a Mage to develop disciplines by drinking vampire blood. It's also possible (by using some hosed-up dark magic) to become a werewolf. There was a character in 2nd Edition who managed to pull all of that off and became the most absolutely ridiculous character that WW ever published. Eventually, sanity took over in the writing room and a group of heavies from the Mage and Werewolf game systems got together to wipe him out. Is he the guy who got turned into a ghost ash tray?
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 20:44
|
|
|
UrbicaMortis posted:I'm surprised the wererats are opposed to the weaver and civilisation considering how much rats are traditionally associated with cities. In fact, if i had tried to guess what changing breeds were most likely to be primarily urban, I would have guessed wererats and werepigeons. Wererats actually share a lot in common with Durden. They live by scavenging on the decaying parts of the urban infrastructure and while they're not opposed to masses of people, they are opposed to modern civilization. They're also really big into diseases. If a wererat originally inspired the one crazy disease cult guy in Downtown LA, I wouldn't be surprised.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 20:48
|
|
|
xanthan posted:Is he the guy who got turned into a ghost ash tray? Yes. And to any of you wondering how this all went down, remember that it was written in the 1990's when everything published in either comics or gaming was a boring, grimdark power fantasy. Here's his picture.  UrbicaMortis posted:Actually, do werepigeons exist? No, but there are wereravens called the Corax. They're gossipy, spying, cowardly birds and one of the few changing breeds that get along with werewolves because they've acted as spies and rumormongers since way back in the day. Edit: Hahahaha!! They actually used him to sell their product line for a while. The 1990's were a ridiculous time. 
Zeroisanumber fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Jul 13, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 20:49
|
|
|
Zeroisanumber posted:That said, it is quite possible for a Mage to develop disciplines by drinking vampire blood. It's also possible (by using some hosed-up dark magic) to become a werewolf. There was a character in 2nd Edition who managed to pull all of that off and became the most absolutely ridiculous character that WW ever published. Eventually, sanity took over in the writing room and a group of heavies from the Mage and Werewolf game systems got together to wipe him out. That was in first edition. They systematically corrected all those loopholes as they went through rules changes in second edition and Revised. Off the top of my head, drinking vampire blood as a mage now inhibits your magick to some significant extent and makes it impossible for you to improve with it. (You're mainlining static magick, after all.) The Skin Dancer rite that Haight used to become a werewolf is still in the game, but using it is a virtual death sentence (you end up at eight points on a ten-point scale of Wyrm corruption) and you don't get access to any of the benefits associated with being a member of Garou society, like having Gifts or the first clue what you're doing. They also made it increasingly punitive for abominations to exist, which are Garou who survived being Embraced by a vampire. Members of any other Changing Breed who get Embraced don't even get that; I don't recall what happens for each breed off the top of my head, but none of them lent themselves to being anything close to a playable character. IIRC, one just dies instantly with no roll; one lives until, at most, the next sunrise; and at least one goes instantly batshit insane and enters a killing frenzy that only ends when it dies. None of which addresses the real problem, which is that if a mage knows Forces, wins initiative, and can either justify a coincidental effect or is in a position where Paradox isn't that much of a concern, a freshly-created mage can murder virtually anything else in the oWoD in one round. You either ambush mages or you don't fight them at all. xanthan posted:Is he the guy who got turned into a ghost ash tray? Yeah, in an online FAQ. Somebody asked if he became a wraith when he died and the answer was basically "...oh, gently caress you. Yes, but..."
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 20:54
|
|
|
Wanderer posted:They also made it increasingly punitive for abominations to exist, which are Garou who survived being Embraced by a vampire. Members of any other Changing Breed who get Embraced don't even get that; I don't recall what happens for each breed off the top of my head, but none of them lent themselves to being anything close to a playable character. IIRC, one just dies instantly with no roll; one lives until, at most, the next sunrise; and at least one goes instantly batshit insane and enters a killing frenzy that only ends when it dies. These would be the Corax and Mokole, were ravens and were dinosaurs crocodiles whatever. See, unlike the other changing breeds, these two get their Rage powers from Helios, the sun. Corax that are bitten burst into flames and no-save die and the vampire that bit them dies with their blood ashing them from the inside. Mokole so bitten fly into a super strong frenzy and hunt down any other vamps nearby, then die. It's a messy business for most. On the other hand, Nuwisha just die and the vamp is unharmed. Other than Coyote broadcasting what just happened to the others, which usually ends messily for all involved. Oh and it's important to note that upon reading the Changing Breeds book and a few of the different breed books, nobody likes the Garou, especially not other Garou. Kobold eBooks fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Jul 13, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 21:01
|
|
|
Okay, that was easier to find than I thought. What happens when a vampire tries to turn a werecreature into a vampire? Ananasi (werespiders): Complete immunity. A vampire can't get any nourishment from their blood or finish drinking from them. Bastet (werecats): They rapidly lose all their Gnosis and spiritual abilities, leaving them unable to enter the Umbra or activate Gifts. You "just" end up with an insane, heavily corrupt shapeshifting vampire. Corax (wereravens): Because one of their patron spirits is Helios, the spirit of the sun, they don't get to be vampires. They automatically die the next time the sun rises. Gurahl (werebears): They're known as Umfalla, or the soul-dead. They can kind of survive in the way Garou can, but it's entirely likely that nearby sleeping werebears will wake up for the specific purpose of coming to kill you. Mokole (werealligators): Like Corax, they're too closely tied to Helios for the Embrace to take. Unlike Helios, they instantly enter a killing frenzy and stay that way until they're dead or the next sunrise. The Mokole in Crinos can and often do resemble dinosaurs. Exit sire. Nuwisha (werecoyotes): They just die. They're way too close to their patron spirit for him to allow that to happen. Kitsune (werefoxes): Once they've been drained dry and their sire puts some blood on their tongue, they instantly burst into a brief but intense pillar of fire. Ratkin (wererats): They may be technically alive, but their bodies don't accept the change and rot just as if they'd died normally. Rokea (weresharks): No rules exist, apparently. It may never have been tried. (Incidentally, this is also a list of all the surviving werecreatures in the oWoD.) The main takeaway point is that the only spirits that want to voluntarily interact with vampires are ones aligned with the Wyrm, and even those aren't crazy about the idea. Getting Embraced is an immediate headfirst dive into hell for any shapeshifter, starting with being severed from the tangible proof of their connection to loving, present gods and just getting worse from there. You can't spend blood points in the same turn as Gnosis or Rage, so you can't stack Celerity and Rage together to get like eighteen actions in a turn; the vampires don't get you and the werecreatures want to kill you; and you're likely going to descend into a suicidal depression if you don't just off yourself immediately. bathroomrage posted:Oh and it's important to note that upon reading the Changing Breeds book and a few of the different breed books, nobody likes the Garou, especially not other Garou. One of the funny things that became obvious as they released additional Changing Breed sourcebooks was that the only reason the Garou were able to pull off the War of Rage in the first place is that they're the only shapeshifters who are pack predators. The rest are solitary and/or aren't fighters on their level. On an individual basis, most of the Changing Breeds will straight-up win against an individual Garou, but you don't typically get to fight one Garou at a time. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Jul 13, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 21:08
|
|
|
UrbicaMortis posted:I'm surprised the wererats are opposed to the weaver and civilisation considering how much rats are traditionally associated with cities. According to the Ratkin, their role was (some argue, is) to step in when Garou fail to sufficiently cull the human race, and do it for them. This meant keeping close tabs on human colonies, ergo said association. But when the the War of Rage happened and the Garou started wiping out the Ratkin, the Ratkin ran for the spiritual hills and hid away deep in the Umbra and interbred with the kinfolk that went with them, as well as rat spirits. This is why Ratkin are batshit insane even by shapeshifter standards, because prolonged exposure to the Umbra is bad for your sanity at the best of times, without adding in the cumulative result of countless generations of exposure and interbreeding with spirits. They've only come back to the world because they're convinced the end times are at hand, and most of them are pretty drat chuffed about it because it means those drat Garou are going to get theirs. They walk the tightrope between Rage and Gnosis even more so than any other Changing Breed - a Ratkin with more Rage than Gnosis is twitchy, energetic, and prone to anger. If they've got a lot more, they're prone to frenzy even if unprovoked. On the other side of the coin, a Ratkin with more Gnosis than Rage is quiet, contemplative and serene. But if it's an extreme imbalance, they can fall prey to delusions, prophecy, paranoia, or hallucinations. So yeah, while they can walk a knife-edge of sanity, they're always close to falling one way or the other into some variety of lunacy. Somewhere out there may be Ratkin descended from those who didn't flee to the Umbra from the War of Rage, and thus not insane and destructive and diseased - but they'd be so distinct to count as their own breed. Edit: Wanderer posted:The main takeaway point is that the only spirits that want to voluntarily interact with vampires are ones aligned with the Wyrm, and even those aren't crazy about the idea. On paper, Wyrm spirits (also known as Banes) possessing a vampire seems like an easy sell for the former. The vampires are already hosting a big ol' angry Beast in them and most are already flirting with all the other corruptive thought patterns that makes regular folk easy prey to possession, after all. But whatever it is that makes a vamp a vamp doesn't play well with others, and apart from Banes of Blood or Frenzy, any that try to possess a vampire end up trapped and not even remotely in control. Earlier in the thread Harold Zettler, the Malkavian Antitribu on the board of directors of Pentex, was mentioned. He's been experimenting and has come up with a fun variety of vampire Fomori - Fomori being the term for a being possessed by a Bane. They are Blood Hounds, vampires possessed by Blood Banes. They can track like, well, bloodhounds and vomit blood that burns like napalm, at the cost of a terrible disease that comes in a variety of colours and flavours, all of them wasting and communicative to those the vampire feeds on. And they're reliant on a Pentex-developed blood transfusion once a month or they quickly start to waste away to nothing. Tehan fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Jul 13, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 21:23
|
|
|
apostateCourier posted:The whole "Exalted as backstory to the World of Darkness" thing is a huge As far as the oWoD was concerned, Exalted was absolutely the backstory. The Exalted were the proto-hunters, the first monster-slayers created by God to fight against the darkness. When they won, they got bored, and fell into corruption. God blasted them all into monsters themselves, and then turned His back on the world. He's still sulking, which is how come all the various nasties of the oWoD get to play around -- and why high-level Wraiths were allowed to irrevocably convert lesser wraiths into the equivalent of gold pieces (or toasters, or comfy chairs, or whatever). No idea if this held into nWoD in any way, of course. The oWoD was a truly incredible fictional construct -- huge, shaky, often self-contradictory, but absolutely crammed full of detail, imagination, and crunchiness. It was an amazingly ambitious idea, and if some corners of it are best left forgotten, it was still a towering achievement. There are very few fictional worlds with so much depth and breadth crammed into them. The fact much of it was batshit crazy just helped.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 22:18
|
|
|
I don't think we've talked about the Kitsune. May as well round-off the werecreature collections, especially if their the liver-eating tricksters I expect them to be.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 22:21
|
|
|
Arcade Rabbit posted:I don't think we've talked about the Kitsune. May as well round-off the werecreature collections, especially if their the liver-eating tricksters I expect them to be. I don't know -too- much about them(I never looked into their specific book) but from the entry in the general Changing Breeds book, they are very recent, as in didn't exist until recently and can use a form of magic, which is absolutely baffling and terrifying to other supernaturals. IIRC they revel in this fact and are almost as fond of loving with people as the werecoyotes are.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 22:29
|
|
|
Arcade Rabbit posted:I don't think we've talked about the Kitsune. May as well round-off the werecreature collections, especially if their the liver-eating tricksters I expect them to be. We haven't gone into Bastet. I think they have the most varieties of the changing breeds just because there are so many different types of big cats in the world.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 22:48
|
|
|
Kitsune are of the Beast Court, the Asian were-creature alliance in service to Gaia (well, they say Emerald Mother, but it's probably the same thing). The Hakken branch of the Shadow Lords and the entire Stargazer tribe signed up with them, and the Nagah (weresnakes), Kitsune (werefoxes) are almost entirely within them. A lot of Changing Breeds have a subset among the Beast Court - Khan of the Bastet, split between their roles as spies and warriors; Kumo of the Ananasi, who dumped Ananasa to go be BFFs with the Wyrm; Nezumi of the Ratkin, masters of dirty fighting; Sami-Bito of the Rokea, who got over the whole sea-only thing ages ago; Tengu of the Corax, who kidnap humans and train them into ninja monster-hunters and let them loose for, apparently, shits and giggles; and Zhong Lung of the Mokole, who are pretty much weredragons. The supernatural East is a whole other world to the supernatural West - not just in terms of things that go bump in the night, but also in basic thematics. Where the western world is, as is often said, Gothic-Punk, the East is a supernatural John Woo movie, neon lights and kung-fu fighting in the rain. As such, most of the above are left out or only briefly touched on in the regular splats, and are instead given the spotlight in the splatbook Hengeyokai: Shapeshifters of the East, though the Nagah have their own splat.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 22:57
|
|
|
They're the youngest werecreatures, native to Japan (as one might expect), exclusive to China and Japan (as one might not expect), and compensate for not having the same level of rapid healing as the other shifters by having a greater facility with magic. If you're using the rules for it, Kitsune can actually use "hedge magic," which is a ritual-based kind of sorcery that's available to mortals. Failing that, they're heavily reliant upon their Gifts and a particular kind of sorcery all their own called Ju-Fu, or "paper magic." Their role is a lot like the Nuwisha's. They're tricksters, sages, and thieves. They have the same breeding rules as Garou do, but when a Kitsune is born, their parent(s) almost always die. Their metis aren't discriminated against but do go through life knowing that their existence probably meant the deaths of both parents, which also means they're very rare. This actually dovetails neatly with another thing: in Asia, the local shifters consider themselves members of the Beast Courts, an ancient interbreed compact to defend Asia against the Wyrm. Their level of cooperation is unheard of anywhere else in the world, even if it's a bit begrudging, and they have the additional issue that some of them think the current situation is just one step in a cycle. As such, there's a growing school of philosophical thought that they should just let the Wyrm win, all the better to get the next stage of the cycle over with as quickly as possible. They also practice a weird form of detente with the Asian vampires, which are very different from the usual variety, but I never read Kindred of the East so I couldn't tell you exactly how. The Beast Courts consist largely of: - The Zhong Lung, Mokole shifters whose war forms resemble Chinese dragons from folklore. - The Hakken, an Eastern offshoot of the Shadow Lords that do not resemble their Western cousins very much at all. They're based out of Japan and are so intertwined with that culture that there are barely any wolves among them at all, similar to the Glass Walkers. - There's also an offshoot tribe of the Glass Walkers, the name of which both escapes me and would be difficult to spell even if I remembered it. They're not much different from Western Glass Walkers. - The Tengu, eastern Corax. - The Kitsune. - The Ratkin. - The Khan, who represent a big chunk of India. They're weretigers. - The occasional Rokea wereshark. - The Stargazer tribe of Garou, as of Werewolf Revised, decided to focus on their home territory and essentially joined the Beast Courts. This both matters, because they essentially cut all ties with the western Garou Nation to do it, and doesn't matter, because at most there are six to nine hundred of them worldwide and not all of them made the move. The whole Beast Courts deal is part of the year-long drive to flesh out Asia in the World of Darkness, which was both just as bad as you'd think it would be for a bunch of Western nerds writing about Asian folklore in the late 1990s, and actually kind of cool in some ways.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 23:00
|
|
|
Also, I just realized I lied earlier. There's one more race of shifters out there, and that's the Ajaba. They're werehyenas. Not even the other shapeshifters are at all sure what the Ajaba were supposed to do. They were native to Africa, never prolific, and never high-profile. In the mid-1990s, there was a werelion warlord in Africa called Black Tooth, who led a pride of Bastet and Kinfolk called the Endless Storm. Apparently Black Tooth's deal was that he was in the Umbra when the nukes were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the ensuing spiritual shockwaves drove him crazy. He vowed to protect Africa from, well, everything that wasn't him. He was as dangerous to other Bastet as he was to the Wyrm, and one of his crowning achievements of assholery was nearly wiping out the Ajaba. That came back to haunt him, as one of the survivors was a young girl named Kisasi. She approached the other shifters that are native to Africa and was responsible for the foundation of the Ahadi, a nearly unprecedented coalition of allied shapeshifters: Red Talons, Silent Striders, werecheetahs, werehyenas, a few scattered Bastet, etc. Their first task was to take down Black Tooth and the Endless Storm. In so doing, they found out that while Black Tooth was insane and dangerous, he was also doing a pretty loving amazing job of keeping both Westerners and vampires out of Africa, and he'd managed to keep a massive monster in check underneath the Kalahari desert by making sure it stayed asleep. Sure, he was a textbook case of the cure being worse than the disease, but the Ahadi's got its hands full. Of course, it helps that the other leader of the Ahadi is a Silent Strider named Walks-With-Might, and giving him a situation where he's getting invaded on all sides by vampires is actually a pretty good plan as far as Silent Striders are concerned. Werewolves hate vampires, but the Silent Striders have vampire hunting down to a science by now.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2014 23:13
|
|
|
Wait, isn't there a Chinese vampire in this game? If I remember right there's some weird crap about them only sort of being eastern vampires? Like, they aren't, they're just the closest thing to vampires in the eastern part of the setting?
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 00:22
|
|
|
There are the Kuei-jin, yeah. Melissa killed one of them for Knox way back in Santa Monica, actually. I think we're all purposely not talking about them much so we don't accidentally spoil game events though so yeah.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 00:31
|
|
|
Wanderer posted:Asian vampires, which are very different from the usual variety, but I never read Kindred of the East so I couldn't tell you exactly how. Kuei-Jin. They're not at all related to the vampires descended from Caine, and draw on the eastern myths about vampires rather than the western ones. Instead of blood, they drain Chi from the living (albeit via blood), and much of their nature depends on what sort of Chi they're living off. Instead of the Beast, they have a P'o - an alter ego that can sometimes take control of them and seeks the downfall of the Kuei-Jin. Instead of Paths, they have Dharma, through which they seek redemption and enlightenment (as they are, or believe themselves to be, criminals escaped from Hell), and the further along the Dharmic path they choose, the more ways they can monkey with Chi. The Dharmic paths were founded by the same guy taught Saulot, of being-diablerized-by-Tremere fame, which is probably why Dharmic redemption is similar to Golconda that some Cainite vampires seek. Wanderer posted:- There's also an offshoot tribe of the Glass Walkers, the name of which both escapes me and would be difficult to spell even if I remembered it. They're not much different from Western Glass Walkers. The Boli Zousizhe. They split off from the Glass Walkers further back than the Glass Walkers' history goes, and early on they moved within Confucianism and later Mahayana Buddhism just as the western Glass Walkers did within Christianity. But they were outmaneuvered during the rise of the Manchu and lost all their pull within the government, and in desperation threw their lot in with the British East India Company, and moved to Hong Kong en masse when the British gained control of it, putting deep roots within the Hong Kong triads. When Hong Kong switched back to Chinese control and Chinese authorities came down hard on the triad, it hurt the Boli Zousizhe powerbase. They were on the ropes up until the first two weeks of '02, when an unprecedented and completely unexpected twelve cubs experienced their first change, before which they weren't on anybody's radar, which was a much-needed boost to their numbers.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 00:54
|
|
|
Wanderer posted:
How, exactly?
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 02:47
|
|
|
ceaselessfuture posted:How, exactly? You ever hear of the classic D&D spell Fireball? It's usually not available to Wizards until they're level 5. It's kind of just A Spell You Can Cast as a freshly-made Mage in WoD. Big ol' fireball. Boom.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 02:49
|
|
|
alright wonderful Goon Sirs,  the hell out of me about Mage's please? PS: You are all the best
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 02:56
|
|
|
ceaselessfuture posted:How, exactly? I burn three Quintessence, roll three dice for Arete, and spend Willpower. Forces adds one success for purposes of direct damage; the ten-sided dice are rolled at difficulty 3/4/5 and I get an automatic success because of the Willpower expenditure. Forces 3 is the ability to control and transmute "minor" forms of energy: fire, electricity, momentum, light, etc. I am not limited as to which of those I use. Four successes will inflict eight Health Levels of damage when most humanoid creatures have seven. If you're a vampire and I use fire, you don't get to soak that with anything other than Fortitude and you have to check for frenzy. If you're a werewolf, you'll probably soak some of that, unless the attack took the form of me magnetically accelerating my lucky silver dollar into your jugular vein. That's assuming that I don't do something indirect that you can't counter, like telekinetic chokeholds, flinging you straight up as hard and far as you'll go, or imprisoning you in a sphere of force. I could convert all of your body heat to cold or all your potential kinetic energy to light, so you're suddenly glowing but you can't move. If we're in the middle of the street and I can't go loud, it's not that big of a deal. Maybe a piano "coincidentally" falls on your head, somebody nearby happens to lose control of their SUV, or you trip and sail into a nearby open manhole. Maybe I use a weapon to cover the Forces effect; a .22 round inexplicably does eight Health Levels of lethal damage due to an explosive tip and a quirk of anatomy. (The bullet went in through your eye but didn't have enough punch to go through the back of your skull, so it caromed around inside your brain until its momentum bled off. Very sad.) There's a rule for specifically using magick rolls to lower the difficulty on standard actions. A sawn-off shotgun at point-blank range does eight dice of damage, extra successes on the hit roll add to the damage dice, I can almost guarantee I'll hit, and I can pretty much cancel out the penalty for a called shot to the neck. Maybe I don't know Forces. With Correspondence, I can touch you and teleport you anywhere in the world that I'm personally familiar with and I happen to regularly vacation on the beach in Australia, where it's sunny right now and there's no cover for half a mile. Maybe I just teleport you straight up as far as I can see, or into a bank vault I saw once that won't open again until next Tuesday. If I decide I don't want to fight, I just won't be there anymore. If I know Matter instead, I always have a silver weapon when I need one and you're always just as flammable as I need you to be. I don't know why that person was carrying half a pound of wet, raw sodium in his pocket, Officer. If we're in the Umbra or an isolated place and I can go loud, it is relatively trivial to turn the dead skin and hair on a Garou's head into pure silver, or a vampire's entire body into something less annoying, because his rear end is 100% pure dead tissue. Spirit? No big deal. If I know Spirit 3 I could have prepared any number of nasty surprises, assuming I don't just turn you into a living fetish for the nastiest thing I can find in the local Umbra. Mind? Okay, sure. I don't have to fight you if I don't want to. It'd be pretty easy to hit you with enough projected fear that you don't stop running until you cross the state line. You can also use knowledge of multiple Spheres of magick for combination effects. For example, you need Life and Correspondence to teleport something inside or out of someone, or Life and Matter to turn dead things into living things (e.g. a human to a statue). With Mind and Entropy, I could theoretically zero in on the one thing you do not want to hear right now, finding the weak point in your personal philosophy in order to talk you out of attacking me. A lot of these will cause Paradox, I could botch the roll, I might be out of Quintessence, or you could have one of several dozen fetishes, Gifts, Disciplines, rituals, or magical items that specifically deflects or brunts the force of a magickal attack. Stargazer werewolves go so far as to specifically traffic with Paradox spirits, and have bound a few into weapons, which would be devastating for any mage you wanted to go after. Still, the point's made; mages have the most flexible and theoretically powerful set of abilities in the entire World of Darkness and it is not hard to get access to some of the best toys right at character creation. There are a lot of very good reasons not to use those toys directly and the average munchkin will get eaten alive, but if you decide to abandon subtlety once in a very great while, you can make terrible things happen to somebody. JackNapier posted:alright wonderful Goon Sirs, You may want to be more specific.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 03:59
|
|
|
Well someone mentioned the Celestial Chorus before, why not start there and see what sounds good?
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 05:20
|
|
|
xanthan posted:Well someone mentioned the Celestial Chorus before, why not start there and see what sounds good? Like several of the modern Traditions, it's a big tent with a lot of different representative faiths in it. Their general point of unification is that they derive their belief system, and thus their magick, from a belief in a higher power. This is not necessarily a big mainstream monotheistic religion; the head of the Tradition, for example, is a 300-year-old African woman who maintains her childhood faith in a sun goddess; her second-in-command is an Orthodox rabbi. If you're playing as a Chorister, your magickal style will take a great deal from the various mystical schools of thought within religious tradition: the Qabbala, numerology, the thousand names of God, intercession via the saints, etc. Your various tools and practices bring you closer to the Divine, and thus to the ultimate goal of Ascension through reunion with the original divine principle. Music is a huge part of the Tradition's practices, and they have a habit of referring to themselves as Singers. Their signature magickal Sphere is Prime, which is about the detection, channeling, and use of Quintessence, the magickal energy that binds the universe together. Quintessence is the base stuff of the universe and absolutely everything is made out of it. When encountered in its raw, "free" form, a mage can use it to make his or her spells easier to perform, but as you get better at Prime, you gain the ability to manipulate the otherwise-untouchable Quintessence inside objects, including the ability to subtract it entirely, which disintegrates the object. Prime is initially of dubious use in dealing with anything other than magick itself, but any mage with half a brain wants to have at least two points of it; you need Prime 2 to transmute ambient Quintessence, which in conjunction with other Spheres, lets you create something from "nothing." (For example, Forces 2 lets me control electricity but I can't create it, so if I want to zap somebody, I need a power source in the immediate area. I'd need Forces 3/Prime 2 to fire a lightning bolt from my hand.) Prime is also very useful in moving around Quintessence, which is used as both a currency and valuable resource among mages.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 05:53
|
|
|
When talking about the Technocracy it's easy to understate how big an advantage their whole genesis and cause is, in promoting unity. You have five schools of thought that all branch out from the same general roots in maths, biology, engineering, and psychology which have a lot of basic overlap. The Traditions may as well be called 'the Also-Rans' because it's the strongest thing keeping them all together. And even then there's infighting and exclusion, since there're schools of magic outside of the Big Nine that've been marginalized or just left so far out of fashion that they lost their seat on the council. One of the big parts to actually playing Mage is conceptualizing your character's overall worldview, how it fits with their tradition (if any), and how they make it all happen. Every sphere of magic you want to use, after all, requires a focus to use it; that's kind of a handy tool you can have to sum up why your Forces magic makes things explode. So while it's possible to say that your Forces effect is 'a gas main just happened to explode,' in a completely abstract sense, it's not going to work for a Verbena (kind of like Wicker Man pagans) who's actual focus for Forces is invoking the elements with their ceremonial knife. Tradition mages focus tend to be very idiosyncratic when compared from one Tradition to the next. An Akashic mage that's focusing on koans and moments of Enlightenment for their Mind magic, for example, is going to have to really stretch out to work on a Mind effect with a Dreamspeaker who's Mind focus is talking to their family ancestor. They certainly can work out their differences, but there'll be more bumps and jags along the way than an Iteration-X magician who uses procedural coding for Mind effects and a NWO spook that uses similar techniques in their scarily-named data collection operation focus. This is kind of mechanically reflected in the game with Rotes. Which are like 'mini disciplines' that have more explicit game effects with certain combination of spheres, that either lay out what's possible with that collection of powers (because Mage is all about what your GM is willing to allow based on your explanation) or sweeten the deal with extra bonuses. Rotes are usually very specific to each Tradition because they rely so much on that common paradigm within the Tradition, but with the Technocracy they're swapped around, borrowed, and outright stolen from each other as easily as inter-office coffee mugs.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 07:35
|
|
|
Actually, let me back up. The initially playable faction in Mage is the Council of Nine Traditions, representing the nine largest schools of mystic thought in the World of Darkness. Unlike a lot of the other "splats," they're joined together loosely at best, membership in one is not predetermined, you can leave at any time, and each Tradition is more of an umbrella covering a wide variety of schools of thought than anything else. They were formed in the 1400s as the Order of Reason, which would become the Technocracy, began to pick up steam, and the various mystics decided that they were better off together than apart. As a general rule, the Traditions are mostly neutral in the greater cosmological scheme of things, with a slight bias towards the Wyld. There are nine Traditions, one for each of the as-traditionally-discussed nine Spheres of magickal thought. They do not consider this a coincidence. Each Tradition considers a particular Sphere to be their bread and butter, and if you play a member of that Tradition you pay less XP to learn new ranks of that Sphere. You can learn any Sphere as a member of any Tradition, but having access to your mentors' and teachers' knowledge base makes it easier to learn about their particular specialties. The present-day nine Traditions are the following: * The Akashic Brotherhood, which encompasses a variety of martial traditions. The stereotype is that they're all Shaolin monks, but the general idea is to use training of the body to perfect the mind. They practice a particular martial art called Do which contains and embodies all schools of thought. Their members include Buddhists, Taoists, and anybody who'd be interested in pushing the limits of their own body. They're also heavily invested in reincarnation. ** Their trademark Sphere is Mind, which encompasses empathy, telepathy, self-control, and astral projection. At the highest levels of the Sphere, a Mind mage can create sentience where it did not previously exist. * The Celestial Chorus; see above. Religious people who practice "magick" through proximity to and service to whatever they perceive as the Divine. ** They practice Prime. See above. * The Cultists of Ecstasy: they nominally started in India and still use a lot of terminology from there, but the Cult's for any mage who pursues altered states of being. Stereotypically they're hippies, junkies, and sex fiends, which is not helped by their nominal leader, the notoriously bisexual and polyamorous Marianna of Balador. In practice, an individual Cultist is as likely to be into music, dance, pain, adrenaline, or certain modes of behavior as they are drugs or sex, as long as it has the potential to offer an alternate state of perception. There's one guy in their revised splatbook that's into magick via immersion in video games. ** They practice the Sphere of Time, because time flies when you're having fun: precognition, postcognition, slowing or speeding up time in a local area, setting up contingencies or loops, and finally being able to jump forward or temporarily go "sideways" from time. Time travel into the past is possible but only for the greatest masters of the Sphere, which is another way of saying "you don't get to do this and still be a playable character." * The Dreamspeakers, which are the least organized of the lot and are basically only a Tradition at all because a lot of them are from various aboriginal cultures and it seemed like they'd be hosed by history if they did otherwise. As a Dreamspeaker, you're a member of a shamanic or animistic tradition, mostly concerned with the spirit world and regarding the "real world" as anything from a dream to a quaint illusion. A lot of their personal cosmology works in neatly with the werewolves' and if you had to pick a Tradition that would be all buddy-buddy with the Garou, it'd be these guys. Magickal tools include drumming, dance, smoke, the whole nine yards, and the trick when actually playing one is in not being creepy and appropriative of somebody else's actual culture. ** The Dreamspeakers basically couldn't get anything done without Spirit magick, which is all about interaction with the spirit world: seeing into it, talking with otherwise inaccessible spirits, allowing yourself to be possessed, making fetishes, traveling to distant realms. * The Euthanatos, a creepy collection of death mages from all over the world. They also began in India, where they had wars with the Akashic Brotherhood that lasted generations and didn't end when people died, but now they're from all over the world. Part of induction into the formal Tradition is being forced through a ritual where a mage becomes a wraith for a while, effectively dying and coming back. The stereotypical Euthanatos is functionally identical to a serial killer. Since they know for an absolute fact reincarnation is real and effective, they feel very little remorse about killing and will unhesitatingly murder someone who they perceive as serving no present use to the world. The central concept to their belief system is that of the Great Wheel; everything happens for a reason, and nothing lasts forever. They get along okay with like-minded vampires. ** Euthanatos are closely affiliated with the Sphere of Entropy, which is the study of chance, chaos, and destruction. You can use it to find the weak spots in objects, people, or ideals; cause objects to rot or people to decay; and destroy anything from objects to ideals. More happily, you can use it to influence the outcome of truly random events, like dice rolls or card games, and any spell or effect that specifically deals with chance or luck is going to have some Entropy mixed in. You know that thing Michael Carpenter does in The Dresden Files where he just shows up wherever God needs him? That would be an Entropy/Correspondence effect under these rules. * The Order of Hermes, the mage equivalent to the Ventrue and the closest thing to a D&D mage you can find in the system: wands, swords, staves, mystic geometry, summoning circles, big dusty books, you name it. Deliberately influenced by the tradition of the same name from Ars Magica and the Tradition that gave rise to the Tremere. Seemingly unable to do anything without being bastards about it; shackled to concepts that do not bother other mages at all, like having to safeguard their True Names. ** They study Forces, which is the magickal Sphere about blowing poo poo up. Rank one lets you perceive energy with the naked eye and see in the dark; ranks two and three are about the control and transmutation of minor forces like fire, cold, and light; and ranks four and five are about the control and transmutation of major forces, like gravity, electromagnetism, and nuclear radiation. If you achieve five dots in Forces, you are a one-person nuclear power. * The Sons of Ether, who left the Technocracy a hundred years ago and never looked back. They're pulp-fiction adventurer/scientists, who aren't necessarily shackled to the scientific method; where Technocratic science is slower and only gradually innovative, Sons of Ether tend to progress from "idea" to "theory" without stopping to think whether or not it'll work, and since they're mages, it'll work. It also means they're free to pursue lots of wacky poo poo that Technocrats would never think of, like space zeppelins, ray guns, and time machines. The archetypical Son of Ether from the original and second edition books acts like he came flying out of a penny dreadful. More problematically, while they aren't overtly sexist and they've got their share of lady scientists, the whole Tradition is stuck in the Victorian period and as a result it tends to be an old boys' club. ** Matter is the Etherites' Sphere. If it's non-living material, a mage with Matter can identify, change, or transmute it. At the highest levels of the Sphere, you can create complex machines out of nothing or make substances that have mixed properties: silk that protects like Kevlar, glass as durable as steel, etc. * The Verbena, which originally represented the "creepy Celtic witches" portion of today's programming, but which have expanded to encompass any mage with an eye towards the manipulation of primal forces via primal beliefs. Blood magick, sacrifices, runes, dancing naked, occasional lunatic devotion to Gaia (who is very real, as one might remember from the entire races of shapeshifters who she created): if Wiccans were super loving hardcore, they'd be the Verbena. ** The Verbena study the Sphere of Life, which lets a mage examine, heal, or change living things. It's easier to affect yourself than other people, but once you hit Life 3 or so, you can be anybody you want. You can also amp your personal physical stats, get rid of that tattoo you hate, turn people into frogs, etc. At Life 4, you can become self-sustaining and not have to eat anymore. * The Virtual Adepts are the newest members of the Traditions and are probably the oddest men out. They're very '90s in their way; the idea behind their magickal paradigm is that all reality is virtual (and remember, this game predates The Matrix by four years or so; it's not a new idea by any means but it's from before the idea was forced into the mainstream); a mage is thus somebody who has reality's cheat codes. (Another way of looking at it is espoused by Dante, one of the line's signature characters: if all reality is comprised of advanced mathematics, magick is a way of getting behind the scenes to tweak the numbers.) The Adepts' ultimate goal is to Ascend through the creation of Reality 2.0, a higher, "better" version of existence, co-created by humans as opposed to some distant and possibly crazed god-figure. ** The Adepts study Correspondence, which is the manipulation of three-dimensional space: personal radar sense, scrying, teleportation, portals, and eventually "co-location": literally being in more than one place at once. "Lost" traditions include the Solificati, an order of alchemists, which disbanded after its representative on the Council chose to betray it, and which is survived in modern days by a very small organization calling itself the Children of Knowledge; and the Ahl-i-Batin, Muslim mystics and past masters of the Sphere of Correspondence, which dropped the Traditions in the 1920s because the Traditions as a whole wasn't putting enough work into the Middle East for their tastes. The Ahl-i-Batin didn't actually go anywhere, but they were notoriously good at going unseen, so they're as gone as they want to be. A mage also doesn't have to have a Tradition at all, or may be a member of a smaller group of mages; the latter are often called Crafts. The largest "Craft" are the notorious representatives of the Goths in '90s White Wolf, the Hollow Ones, which are basically just a bunch of tradition-less mages who hang out together in San Francisco, like black clothes, and have strong opinions on industrial music. They've been around since the '20s (they took their name from Eliot's "The Waste Land") and have occasionally petitioned for Tradition membership, but have always been denied due to having the same organizational structure as the average college dorm. The typical term for a mage that eschews a Tradition at all in favor of going it alone is an "Orphan." Important safety tip for understanding Mage in general: Magick is, in the rules, considered the ability to affect change in reality itself through force of will. That is how the rules work. That is not necessarily how an individual mage works. A big part of Mage is that an individual's perspective and beliefs influence his or her ability to use magick, which is usually called his or her paradigm. Within your paradigm, the way in which you work magick is an absolute, unquestionable truth. All of these different mages under the Traditions' roof have very different ideas about what magick is and isn't, and due to the flexible nature of reality, they're all right. An individual mage may consider himself a mortal agent of God's will on Earth with no inherent power of his own, a shaman who couldn't do a thing without the intercession of various friendly and/or easily-bribed spirits, a traditional wizard who brings the forces of the universe to heel through discipline and study, or a "reality hacker," and they're all basically right because that's how they came to the party. Magick is one thing in the tabletop rules system and a whole lot of things in the game universe. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 11:08 on Jul 14, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 07:41
|
|
|
OAquinas posted: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. And probably the single most hosed Clan, come Gehenna. Have fun, Tremere!  As I recall, the kindest fate shown to them in any Gehenna scenario or the novel was just them being missing entirely, gone without a trace. Which, when you consider all the things we know about that want a piece out of them… brr.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 12:10
|
|
|
GrimRevenant posted:As I recall, the kindest fate shown to them in any Gehenna scenario or the novel was just them being missing entirely, gone without a trace. I always liked the idea that the Malkavians tricked them into blowing themselves up.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 12:41
|
|
|
I never really understood how Nuwashi fit in with the War of Rage and what not. Coyotes are an American species, and the majority of the garou didn't end up in the new world until European settlers did. Were they decimated by the Croatan/Uktena/Wendigo? Despite how anything Native American is treated as having been harmonious and what not in the setting?Wanderer posted:Mage Talk I've always been amused with how the dissident factions of the various Traditions seem to be both more fun and well-rounded than the generic splats (Etherites excluded, but then I love Etherites). Take the Cultists as an example. The main groups are the Joybringers (the stereotypical free-love/free-drugs hippies, with most Cultists joining them due to how fun they are), the Progressivists or whatever they're called (a political group that's basically social justice warriors) and Kraftwerk (club kids that just want one big rave) - they all seem fairly shallow to me. Even the historical groups seem kind of goofy - the Society of Pan is basically a wandering orgy. About the only group there that are cool to me are the Erzuli Jingo, since they're full out hoodoo priests/priestesses And then you have the dissidents - that everyone else in the Tradition really don't like but put up with because sometimes you just need someone that views atrocities as an acceptable path to enlightenment to unleash on your opponents. These groups are the Aghoris, the Acharne, and the Hagalaz. They are, respectively: - A group of Hindu aesthetics that use extreme mutilation to surpass the mortal body by means of pain, mutilation, and destruction to achieve oneness with the universe... which becomes a problem, since they like to share their knowledge and experiences with people around them; - A group of spoiled rich guys who have created something that blends both the Hellfire Club and Fight Club; and - A loose collection of batshit viking berserkers. Why on earth would you want to play anything else than one of those three?
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 16:21
|
|
|
Wanderer posted:The Akashic Brotherhood
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 18:02
|
|
|
citybeatnik posted:I never really understood how Nuwashi fit in with the War of Rage and what not. Coyotes are an American species, and the majority of the garou didn't end up in the new world until European settlers did. Were they decimated by the Croatan/Uktena/Wendigo? Despite how anything Native American is treated as having been harmonious and what not in the setting? The War of Rage didn't really touch the Americas or Africa until the arrival of the European settlers to North and South America, which a couple of books refer to as the Second War of Rage. It never really struck me that the Indians were so much magical and harmonious as they just weren't terribly inclined to the kinds of behavior that a Garou wouldn't appreciate. A group of nomadic hunter-gatherers may make soup out of the neighboring tribe three times a year, but they aren't building cities, so go them. citybeatnik posted:Why on earth would you want to play anything else than one of those three? I get the feeling that the Cult exists in that gray zone between what White Wolf was hoping people would do with their games and what was actually done with their games. Particularly in Mage, there are a lot of templates provided in sourcebooks for characters that absolutely nobody would ever want to play, because they were wholly uninclined towards going out, getting into fights, and having adventures. The Cult falls into that territory to some extent. I always ran Mage and almost never got to actually play it, but the guys who gravitated towards the Cult were also the guys who were partiers in real life. JackNapier posted:Dear god, kind Goon Sir, tell me about Magical Shaolin Monks I kind of hate them because they could not have been more attractive to the munchkin combat-monger set if they'd been planned to be so. The rules on their martial art, Do, as written in the base Mage book are dumb as poo poo, with a practitioner able to do as much damage bare-handed as a shotgun blast without using magick in any way. They're pretty easy to summarize, though. Magick comes from abandoning unnecessary connections and attachments, achieving balance between body and mind, and taking perfect action through harmony with one's surroundings. The Akashics started in Asia, and have a lot of Buddhism and Taoism baked into their philosophy, along with a big spoonful of any other Asian philosophy you care to name; they're also the most combat-oriented of the Traditions with a few different camps that actively strive to do good in the world. Their dead members usually reincarnate into their future new disciples, so death is treated like a momentary unpleasantness. In play, being a stereotypical Akashic Brother means you are straight-up a character from a wuxia film. Foci involve martial-arts techniques, breathing exercises, meditation, yoga, calligraphy, purification rituals, etc. One of the ways in which they're still relevant in the modern day is with the spread of Buddhism and other teachings to the West; yeah, a lot of people treat it like a passing trend rather than a way of life, but enough people pick at least some of it up to keep the Brotherhood relevant. Every so often, that one rear end in a top hat in college who becomes a really fervent Buddhist for a week and a half will actually push through something that was holding him back and Awaken into a contributing member of the Tradition. They're actually harder to play than you'd think because their style is so inner-directed. There are a lot of things you might want to do with magick over the course of a game that are difficult to justify with an Akashic paradigm. It's not a flashy, utilitarian style.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 19:58
|
|
|
citybeatnik posted:I never really understood how Nuwashi fit in with the War of Rage and what not. Coyotes are an American species, and the majority of the garou didn't end up in the new world until European settlers did. Were they decimated by the Croatan/Uktena/Wendigo? Despite how anything Native American is treated as having been harmonious and what not in the setting? A big Nuwisha thing before the War of Rage hit was to travel all over and constantly see the rest of the world outside of 'Coyote's Land', AKA the Americas. So while a few of them stayed home, the rest were abroad traveling and living their crazy, teachy, pranky lives when the War of Rage erupted and welp, they got just as ripped apart as everyone else. Moreso, since they don't have Rage. Coyote was like "Okay now I have to keep track of you so these fucks don't do this again" and that's how you have the quota of Nuwisha allowed in the 'real' world at any one time, the rest are hiding in the Umbra.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 21:33
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 29, 2024 17:17 |
|
|
Tremere are interesting as hell to me. It's odd that the Camerilla would want/accept them despite all of their shady dealings and general secrecy. They seem to effectively be an organization within an organization, which doesn't play to all of the Camerilla's rules and blatantly puts their own rules first. Is there really an explanation as to why the Cam puts up with all of it or let them in/asked them to join in the first place? All of the blood sorcery makes them sound like they would be a better fit for the Sabbat.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2014 21:36
|
|
