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Pierzak posted:Are we still talking about mages? If so, can anyone tell me about the Nephandi? Are they just generic mage-flavored demon worshipper bad guys, or is there something deeper to them like in the case of the Technocracy? What makes a Nephandi distinct from a summoner or necromancer or what-have-you--you can get into some pretty dark poo poo in Mage while still being a respected member of the Traditions--is that Nephandi are explicitly affiliated with the Big Scary Evil side of the oWoD. An individual Nephandi may serve a powerful demon, the Wyrm itself (or some of its really powerful lieutenants, the Maeljin), the vast slumbering never-born creatures in the Dark Umbra, or some of the unknown creatures from the depths of the Deep Umbra, but they're after a Descent when everyone else is arguing over Ascension. As a result, the Traditions and Technocracy both agree that the Nephandi are the greater of two evils, and will cooperate at the drop of a hat once they realize the Nephandi are on the scene. They've been around as long as there have been mages, because as long as there's a path to follow from point A to point B, there's going to be some rear end in a top hat who wants to take the express elevator. They're your demonic Goetians, your demon-worshippers, your witches who are actually doing the things that people accuse other witches of doing, etc. There are a few of them who see their role philosophically: if there's going to be good, then somebody's got to be evil, and that's us. (Alternatively, if the universe can survive what we want to do to it, it has earned the right thereof.) "Splats" for Nephandi include the typical White Wolf "dark reflection" option, which is a barabbi, a mage who held membership in an established Tradition or Convention until they opened the wrong book, listened to the wrong person, went to the wrong place, or whatever; or a "widderslainte," which is slang for a Nephandi who was bad when he or she Awakened and has just gotten worse. In the former case, they're mages who subscribe to a twisted version of their former philosophies. In the latter case, it usually means they're a reincarnation of a past Nephandi, with an "inverted" Avatar and thus no hope of or desire for redemption. A barabbi in one life isn't necessarily always going to reincarnate as a widderslainte, but given how long mages can live, there's a good chance that they're going to have a few leftover acquaintances watching them like hawks. Their factions include: - Infernalists, straight-up servants of the Demon Lords, operating on a very Judeo-Christian view of the world and out to capture the Earth on behalf of the Lords of the Pit. They're the ones who have the best success rate with tempting and corrupting people into their service. - Malfeans, who actually walk the Black Spiral as part of the recruitment bonus and work hand-in-hand with the forces of the Wyrm. They want what the Wyrm wants: the destruction of the Earth by any means necessary. Like everybody else in this particular boat, they tend to be at least a little nuts. - K'llashaa, your basic Lovecraft cultists. They claim Earth was once ruled by creatures they call the Lords of the Outer Dark, and their goal is to make the old place look good for when Mom and Dad get back. There aren't many of them and they actively strive towards inhumanity. White Wolf has traditionally been pretty cagey about Nephandic magickal styles and how many of them there actually are. At the tail end of World War II in the WoD, the Nephandi tried to tap into the power of the war to summon one of their dark masters home, but the Traditions and Technocracy teamed up for a fight that ended with a lot of the surviving Nephandi punted off of Earth entirely. Since then, the remaining Nephandic population of Earth has been working very quietly, allowing the Traditions and Technocrats to rip into each other and building a power base. One thing that's useful to remember is that the early editions of Mage were explicitly built as more of a storytelling game than anything else, about a player slowly building up a character's personal philosophy. There's a lot in the game's design that's taken from the old alchemical concept of the "invisible labyrinth," the idea that magic in general is a tool for the gradual perfection of the self, and with that in mind, the Nephandi's whole goal is to be the corruptive influence that tempts someone to stray from the path.
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Jul 19, 2014 22:07
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Pierzak posted:Are we still talking about mages? If so, can anyone tell me about the Nephandi? Are they just generic mage-flavored demon worshipper bad guys, or is there something deeper to them like in the case of the Technocracy? Generic demon-worshipper bad guys are called infernalists. Nephandi literally want to destroy the universe. They are some of the most hosed up and irredeemable pieces of poo poo in the entire WoD, which is quite an accomplishment. Their avatars are turned inside out through a ritual and they use a different kind of magic as well. Most nephandi reside in the umbral realm and they serve demonic entities or alien beings known as Outer Lords. I also remember one of the Ascension scenario that were released when oWoD was closing curtains featured Nephandi winning, with terrible results for everyone else. fspades fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Jul 19, 2014 |
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Jul 19, 2014 22:09
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Pierzak posted:Are we still talking about mages? If so, can anyone tell me about the Nephandi? Are they just generic mage-flavored demon worshipper bad guys, or is there something deeper to them like in the case of the Technocracy? There are many flavors of Nephandi. Some are like Diabolists, but Awaken. Some follow the Wyrm - these ones tend to cooperate closely with Banes and Black Spiral Dancers. Others worship Malfeans or beings from Deep Umbra. The only thing they have in common is that all of them want to end the world. This doesn't necessarily have to be a conscious goal. Many of them, of course, created a rationale why do they want to destroy reality, but the truth is they don't need one. Their Avatars are overcome by corruption and drive their owners to spread it further. When a prospective Fallen decides to turn, he is brought to one of the Nephandi Horizon realms. He has to enter alone the room known as the Caul. Inside, he encounters... something, probably a being from Lower Umbra. If the mage tries to withdraw, the creature rips him apart. To proceed, he has to approach the entity, which promptly twists his avatar into its new shape. The Nephandi who turned willingly are named barabbi. From now on, they are completely irredeemable. Even killing them doesn't solve the problem completely - it returns the Avatar to the pool, but doesn't do anything about its corruption. Sooner or later, someone Awakens and becomes a Nephandus outright. Such mages are known as widderslainte and are more respected among their fellows than barabbi. The only way to be sure is to perform Gilgul - a Spirit 5 ritual that destroys the Avatar, making its victim completely incapable of magic. Unfortunately, most Nephandi are also masters of turning others, especially the mages. Both the Traditions and the Technocracy have very strict rules against doing any kind of business with the Fallen. You are either supposed to kill one on sight, or get the gently caress away. Doing otherwise will make you Censured (imprisoned) in your Chantry at very least, while the masters try to determine how far gone are you. They are treated more like rabid animals than people - and deservedly so. There were many barabbi who started their descent when trying to interrogate or redeem a Nephandus.
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Jul 19, 2014 22:30
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Wanderer posted:What makes a Nephandi distinct from a summoner or necromancer or what-have-you--you can get into some pretty dark poo poo in Mage while still being a respected member of the Traditions--is that Nephandi are explicitly affiliated with the Big Scary Evil side of the oWoD. An individual Nephandi may serve a powerful demon, the Wyrm itself (or some of its really powerful lieutenants, the Maeljin), the vast slumbering never-born creatures in the Dark Umbra, or some of the unknown creatures from the depths of the Deep Umbra, but they're after a Descent when everyone else is arguing over Ascension. Stuff like this makes me wonder... what's the overall cosmological scheme to the WoD? Is there any consistent one? Vampires seem to lean very heavily on Abrahamic traditions which don't seem to fit with the pagan (for lack of a better term) underpinnings of the Werewolves, neither of which seem like they can exist in the same universe as the Mages, then there's Wraiths, Hunters, Mummies, Changelings and Demons... Like, how does the big trio of Wyrm, Wyld and Weaver mesh with an Abrahamic God who cursed Cain and destroyed Sodom and Gamorrah? Jesus I sound like a two year-old asking why the sky is blue.
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Jul 21, 2014 07:13
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So how about a word regarding the Marauder mages next?
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Jul 21, 2014 07:33
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HaitianDivorce posted:Stuff like this makes me wonder... what's the overall cosmological scheme to the WoD? Is there any consistent one? Vampires seem to lean very heavily on Abrahamic traditions which don't seem to fit with the pagan (for lack of a better term) underpinnings of the Werewolves, neither of which seem like they can exist in the same universe as the Mages, then there's Wraiths, Hunters, Mummies, Changelings and Demons... Once upon a time there was a certain raja who called to his servant and said, 'Come, good fellow, go and gather together in one place all the men of Savatthi who were born blind... and show them an elephant.' 'Very good, sire,' replied the servant, and he did as he was told. He said to the blind men assembled there, 'Here is an elephant,' and to one man he presented the head of the elephant, to another its ears, to another a tusk, to another the trunk, the foot, back, tail, and tuft of the tail, saying to each one that that was the elephant. When the blind men had felt the elephant, the raja went to each of them and said to each, 'Well, blind man, have you seen the elephant? Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?' Thereupon the men who were presented with the head answered, 'Sire, an elephant is like a pot.' And the men who had observed the ear replied, 'An elephant is like a winnowing basket.' Those who had been presented with a tusk said it was a ploughshare. Those who knew only the trunk said it was a plough; others said the body was a grainery; the foot, a pillar; the back, a mortar; the tail, a pestle, the tuft of the tail, a brush. Then they began to quarrel, shouting, 'Yes it is!' 'No, it is not!' 'An elephant is not that!' 'Yes, it's like that!' and so on, till they came to blows over the matter.
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Jul 21, 2014 07:47
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:So how about a word regarding the Marauder mages next? You know how in Mage reality itself is pretty mutable? Imagine what the preferred reality of someone utterly broken and insane would be like. Marauders are more than just insane mages. They're so far over that they actually have twisted their Avatar a bit. They are either unwilling or unable to follow the rules of consensus reality because of their magical brand of insanity (which tends to be based on a specific delusion). Normal mages who try to defy reality get slapped with Paradox and either die or figure it out. These guys actually took the "I reject your reality and replace it with my own" as a life mantra. They have a bubble surrounding them--created by constant unconscious "vulgar" (that is, paradox-generating) magic--where their own version of reality reigns supreme. This makes them incredibly dangerous to confront. Plus, reality doesn't like bubbles of random stuff floating through it. The Paradox generated by these guys doesn't hit them directly--it builds up around them and then randomly strikes any nearby Enlightened individual, aka mages. The only real good news is that they're more or less power capped due to their insanity. The bad news is that as mentioned previously you can do a helluva lot of damage with "common" mage power levels...and even more if you live inside a bubble of "this is what I'd like reality to be" that negates paradox generation within it for you. The really bad news? Marauders who share similar madness can actually team up for greater effects. That's about as dangerous as it sounds--insane mages working together to rewrite reality on a macro scale according to their shared delusion of how it should work, who also don't have to worry about Paradox limiting them. OAquinas fucked around with this message at 08:05 on Jul 21, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 07:59
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Non-parable answer after I've thought about it a bit, and keep in mind I'm not an oWoD polymath - my area of expertise is mostly Vampire and Werewolf and a bit of Demon, not so much the others, so I might be missing things. Prepare for  . There may be a test. There will not be a tl;dr. And please feel free to speak up if there's something I've missed, gotten wrong, or you think deserves more attention.In the beginning, there was capital-G God. Y'know, the bog-standard omnipotent creator-deity. Judeo-Christian Yahweh, Islam's Allah, China's Jade Emperor, and so on. He was just chillin' in emptiness and decided it sucked and said Let There Be Light, and lo, there was light, and of that light Angels were born. The Angels, on God's orders, created everything, including humanity. God only intervened directly when He decided it was time for Him to take off His belt and deliver an rear end-whoopin'. Way early on, when Man was still in the (probably metaphorical) Garden of Eden, the Angels schismed because one of them foresaw that poo poo was going to hit the fan and God either caused it or was going to let it happen. Lucifer lead a civil war with a full third of the Angels at his back and delivered knowledge and awareness to humanity, which beforehand were pretty much bestial, concerned only with survival. Humanity expands and one early human, Cain, performed the first murder. The Angels of Lucifer learned from this and the war in Heaven, which I can only assume consisted of petty slapfights until this point, turned ugly. This is when God stepped in with His belt, and the rebel Angels, now called Fallen, were cast out of Heaven, and Cain, was cursed with the Mark of Caine - but not yet vampirism. He wandered for a while, and met Lilith. Lilith is very much an elephant in the land of the blind. Most sources agree she was the failed prototype for Mrs Adam, and was rejected because of Reasons. Pro-Lilith sources (she has cults) say that it's because Adam tried to, or succeeded in, raping her. Others say that she was the serpent that tempted Eve, but since it was the rebel Angels that did that - probably Lucifer himself - I doubt it. Most likely she was too clever for what God and his loyalist Angels intended for humanity in the Garden. Whatever she was, she and Cain had a weird romance thing going on which is kinda weird if you consider she's his dad's ex-wife, but hey, whatever. Lilith may have been the first Mage - she teaches Caine all the Disciplines, possibly involving a blood ritual if that's not cultural pollution from vampiric scholars. Three Angels, apparently not so happy about all this, visit Cain one by one, offering redemption (most likely with many strings attached) for his brother's murder. Cain rejects each in turn and is cursed (new curses, not Mark of Caine curse) with the vampiric weaknesses - to sunlight, to fire, and the Beast. Allegedly a fourth one appears and namedrops Golconda, which is apparently redemption or a cure to vampirism or whatever, it's complicated, but Cain probably told this one to kick rocks too. After this, Cain is officially Caine, and having learned all he breaks ties with Lilith and fucks off on his own to go found Enoch and the vampire races and so forth. Around now is when God decided that his policy of doing absolutely gently caress-all except for poking his nose in every so often to ruin everything was just too much effort, and fucks off entirely, leaving the loyalist Angels rudderless. A lot of them end up corrupted, and in the east a lot of them become the Yama Kings who find a way to gain power by extracting Chi from the torture of mortals. Two loyalist Angels (known in modern times as the Ebon Dragon and the Scarlet Queen) try to fight a rearguard against these by empowering ten thousand heroes with powers that run off the ambient Chi of the universe, echoes of the Exalted and early prototypes of the modern Hunters. They are 'corrupted', or possibly just don't do as well as the Angels hoped, and in punishment are turned into the first Kuei-Jin, one of whom we briefly encountered earlier in this LP. In modern days they decide to give it another shot, and the Hunters are born. With the rudder shot, creation has to fend for itself. Gaia, the spirit of the Earth, gives birth to the Weaver/Wyrm/Wyld triat, or possibly vice versa - depends who you ask. Gaia decides the Angels aren't doing a drat thing about these humans running around loving things up and creates the Changing Breeds to try to keep things running smooth. In true oWoD creator-deity fashion she completely fucks things up and creates a mirror image of the War in Heaven when the Garou try to murder all the other Changing Breeds because of Reasons, as well as culling the poo poo out of humanity. But in the end Gaia is still arguably the least terrible of all the superpowers in the oWoD. Meanwhile, possibly as a result of the empowering back in the Garden that Lucifer did, or possibly as part of whatever-the-gently caress was the original plan for humanity, each human has a spark of supernatural power in them. Most people do sweet gently caress all with said power, and it used to just sort of leak out. One early parasite off this power were the Fae - everything that went bump in the night that grew strong off the beliefs of people. Then, around the end of the Middle Ages, Something (we'll get back to this, but for now let's go with Something) happened and people started believing less in the old myths, which the Fae refer to as Banality. Some of them tried to sidestep this by shoving their souls inside humans, creating Changelings. The rest lock themselves up in their own little pocket reality called Arcadia, and I assume close their eyes, block their ears, and go 'la la la it's not happening' right up until Apollo 11 lands on the moon and smashes their gates wide loving open. Some people, however, realize this spark of power resides in them, and Awaken, becoming Mages. They've got a bajillion and one theories about how it works so I'm not going to go into the How except to say 'hosed if I know', but the Technocracy, as we've discussed earlier, is probably the Something that hosed the Changelings over so badly. If not, they certainly reinforced the hell out of the Something. In Other News: There is a... being-thing-concept-god-something called Ma'at, which is said to be virtue, justice and balance that keeps the world ticking over nicely. It might be Gaia. It might be a loyalist Angel. It might be a Celestine (a spirit one rung down in the power rankings from Gaia and the Triat). Whatever it is, it is the Good Guy in the battleground that is Egypt. In the Good Guy Corner: Osiris, fourth-generation vampire and founder of the Children of Osiris vampire bloodline (yes, vampire good guys, Egypt breaks all the fuckin' rules). Isis, Mage, and founder of the Cult of Isis, a religious mage order - also wife to Osiris, don't ask me how that works. The Silent Striders werewolf clan, the Bubasti werecats, a bunch of werelizards, and the Eshu changelings. And Isis' invention, via the Spell of Life, Mummies, who still fight the good fight to this day - hence the ongoing line. In the bad corner, we have Set, douchebag little brother of Osiris and third-generation vampire, founder of the Children of Set clan, as well as his BFF Apophis, who's probably an aspect of the Wyrm. The fight went on right until the end of the world, but Set fell early - in 33 BCE he got smacked down by Sho-Horus of the Silent Striders, and in his last (known?) breath he cursed the Silent Strider tribe with an eviction notice, and they haven't been able to set foot in Egypt or put down roots anywhere ever since. What am I missing? Wraiths. Someone else can do Wraith 101, but they're basically people that died with unfinished business and they've got their own society in the Underworld, aka the Low or Dark Umbra, the most goth-y part of the Umbra. Let's do the Umbra now. Low Umbra is where Wraiths hang out. It also has the Abyss, where the Fallen were imprisoned by God. At it's bottom is Oblivion, where reality drains into. Middle Umbra is where shapeshifters and the Triat hang out. It's got anywhere you'd expect to find airbrushed on a panel van or visited on a spirit journey. It's got a lot of places that are metaphorical mirrors of reality. There's the Scar, the manifestation of the industrial revolution - an endless maze of slums, shanties, factories and pollution, where Weaver and Wyrm get it on. There's the Battleground, where every battle ever is still being fought and they tend to spill over, so every episode of Deadliest Warrior can finally be put to the test. And where Middle Umbra is the reflection of Earth, High Umbra is the reflection of humanity's consciousness, and Mages tend to try to hang out here. It's the home of realms of abstract ideas and former small-g gods and their afterlifes. And buffering them all from Earth is the Penumbras, various metaphorical lenses on Earth. There's Shadowlands, a death-themed mirror for Wraiths. The Digital Web, home to Virtual Adepts and probably Malkav. The Dreaming, which used to lead to Arcadia and is now just a hang-out for Changelings. The Spirit realm, where shapeshifters hang out with their spirit buddies. And a whole bunch others. Also keep in mind that the other planets in the solar system are also places somewhere out in the Umbra, each with their own Penumbra, so if you went deep enough into the Umbra you could come out on Mars and high-five someone who went there in a spaceship. I understand that many Mages dream happy dreams of this moment, and work feverishly to bring it to fruition. And there you have it, one surprisingly coherent overarching cosmology.
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Jul 21, 2014 09:33
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And how the gently caress you make any of that into a roleplaying game people actually sit down and play is where White Wolf games lost me entirely.
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Jul 21, 2014 11:30
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Gort posted:And how the gently caress you make any of that into a roleplaying game people actually sit down and play is where White Wolf games lost me entirely. How much do you need to know about the Big Bang or plate tectonics to go about your day-to-day life? Edit: How much do you need to know about the history of petrochemistry and the automobile to drive down to the shops 
Tehan fucked around with this message at 12:02 on Jul 21, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 11:45
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HaitianDivorce posted:Stuff like this makes me wonder... what's the overall cosmological scheme to the WoD? Is there any consistent one? No, and it's more or less on purpose. Ask (some of) the Garou and Gaia created everything (like how the Shadow Lords occasionally come close to acting as if their patron spirit is actually running the show and Gaia's more like a silent partner); ask the Nuwisha and Coyote created everything; ask the vampires and their entire existence is based on Christian apocrypha; ask the mages and get a million different answers because mages are not a unified bloc. Then Demon: The Fallen comes out, the entire line turns out to have strange ties to Exalted, and poo poo gets extra strange. If you absolutely had to do something with this, you could probably hemstitch it together out of the game line's cosmology and some flavor of early Christian mysticism, where the actual truth is one of the chunks of the Bible that they decided to quietly lose during the First Council of Nicaea. As far as White Wolf is concerned, they happily go on record as saying "This is what these people believe, so naturally they're going to say it like it's the truth." Bobbin Threadbare posted:So how about a word regarding the Marauder mages next? As far as other mages are concerned, Marauders come the gently caress out of nowhere, run up a huge Paradox tab by flinging around crazy spells, and stick somebody else with the bill. They're insane and they seem immune to the usual negative effects of vulgar magick; a Marauder can go bowling with fireballs down Broadway and Paradox will seemingly veer off and hit somebody else. Nobody is quite sure where they come from or why they exist. Eventually, they tend to get so crazy that reality doesn't support them anymore and they drift off into the Umbra somewhere, or somebody else gets sick of their poo poo and kills them. Cosmologically, things are more interesting. Marauders are what happens when a higher power decides a mage would be useful, but that mage's conscious mind is a potential impediment. If the Technocracy is in bed with the Weaver and the Nephandi often work for the Wyrm, the Marauders are pawns of the Wyld. They exist to gently caress up the Technocracy's day, slaughter the Nephandi wherever they're found, preserve what's left of the Mythic Age, and kick big holes in consensus reality at every opportunity. Marauders aren't just mages who happen to be insane. They suffer from a very specific kind of distorted perception, where their Avatar is complicit in wrapping them in their own personal reality bubble. Put another way, the mage is probably sane enough, but they're constantly stuck in an insane situation and are reacting as one might expect. That delusion is so strong that it's a kind of ablative shield against Paradox; when reality tries to fix whatever problem the Marauder's causing, it slides off the Marauder's insanity and hits somebody else instead. An individual Marauder might not even think he's a mage at all; his "magick," as far as he's concerned, may just be the circumstances of his insanity. What's changed in recent days, in the storyline, is that there are Marauders showing up who are sane enough to take care of the others, organize them, and get them all working towards a cohesive goal. The first example thereof is a guy named Robert Davenport, who got recruited by the Technocracy but got scared and bailed. They tried to kill him because he knew too much, but he Awakened in the middle of the staged car crash and went Marauder. Davenport has one very pervasive delusion: his wife and daughter, who both died in the crash, are still alive. Other than that, he knows exactly what's going on. His cabal, the Butcher Street Irregulars, has a lot of friends among the various shapeshifters and does a lot of work in the WoD against genuinely evil dudes. Davenport is capable of leading these other Marauders, playing along with their own individual delusions, and turning them into an efficient team: they ferry magical creatures off of Earth to various Umbral realms so they won't die, they blow up Pentex facilities, they kill all sorts of demons and vampires, etc. On the flip side of the coin, there's also a faction of Marauders called the Bai Dai that has decided the most efficient way to weaken consensus reality is to cut down the number of people believing in it by about ninety percent. They're relentless, persistent killing machines with no qualms about using the most destructive tactics possible, such as what they call "zooterrorism": teleport a living, magical creature into a Technocracy base in full view of God and everybody so the Paradox backlash goes off like a nuke. Fun Marauders from the setting include: - Clan 23, a bunch of kids who think they're playing a very absorbing team-based online shooter. They're thorough, murderous, violent, and utterly cheerful the entire time, because it's just a game. - The Men of Gotham, a small group of Marauders who operate in Manhattan and believe themselves to be an informal gathering of non-powered, film noir-ish superheroes. None of them are very powerful as mages go, but coincidental magick is really good for making dramatic entrances. - Barrister Martins, a lawyer who Awakened during his third heart attack. He's under the impression he's defending other sinners in Hell's own court system. - One of the guys in Davenport's cabal is an actor who believes that A) he's in Victorian England and B) he's in a particularly well-rehearsed stage play, with Davenport as the director. He's a master of disguise and infiltration. - Medea, who is apparently the same Medea from the story of Jason and the Argonauts. She's a two-thousand-year-old Oracle of Life (she has a 6 in a Sphere that usually only goes to 5, which makes her one of maybe four or five characters in the setting at this level of power) who never really left ancient Greece. Tehan posted:Also keep in mind that the other planets in the solar system are also places somewhere out in the Umbra, each with their own Penumbra, so if you went deep enough into the Umbra you could come out on Mars and high-five someone who went there in a spaceship. I understand that many Mages dream happy dreams of this moment, and work feverishly to bring it to fruition. Nah, mages have been doing that for years. Read The Book of Worlds sometime. Gort posted:And how the gently caress you make any of that into a roleplaying game people actually sit down and play is where White Wolf games lost me entirely. If you get bogged down in the cosmological bullshit, that wrecks the game very quickly. Where the old World of Darkness games really shine is in their flexibility. I always gravitated towards Mage and Werewolf because they both have a strong dose of old-fashioned pulp adventure in them, where you could go explore the universe in your space zeppelin or awaken the spirit in your car or smash zombies or go fight Nazis in the Hollow Earth. There's a lot of angst in the setting, as one might expect, but the further they went the more comfortable they were with craziness. Here, for example, is the story of some of the most fun I ever had running Mage.
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Jul 21, 2014 12:57
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Tehan posted:Around now is when God decided that his policy of doing absolutely gently caress-all except for poking his nose in every so often to ruin everything was just too much effort, and fucks off entirely, leaving the loyalist Angels rudderless. A lot of them end up corrupted, and in the east a lot of them become the Yama Kings who find a way to gain power by extracting Chi from the torture of mortals. Two loyalist Angels (known in modern times as the Ebon Dragon and the Scarlet Queen) try to fight a rearguard against these by empowering ten thousand heroes with powers that run off the ambient Chi of the universe, echoes of the Exalted and early prototypes of the modern Hunters. They are 'corrupted', or possibly just don't do as well as the Angels hoped, and in punishment are turned into the first Kuei-Jin, one of whom we briefly encountered earlier in this LP. In modern days they decide to give it another shot, and the Hunters are born. Awesome post, Tehan! Thank you. The only correction I have is that according to the internal metaplot document, God was still around to help create the Ten Thousand. His last act was to turn them into the Kuei-Jin, and it was their fall from grace that disgusted him so much that he turned away and buggered off. Wanderer posted:No, and it's more or less on purpose. That's true for the view from inside any one game, but there most definitely was a fully coherent internal cosmology that all the various games hung off -- as Tehan so beautifully demonstrated. Ghostwoods fucked around with this message at 13:11 on Jul 21, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 13:08
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So if I got this right, Marauders are at best "point them at those guys" kind of deal if Mage/faction in question finds them at least beneficial in some way. Do either side of Ascension War have dedicated Nephandi/Marauder Task Force, or are they under the generic purview of respective internal police who then call higher-ups if they happen to bump into one?
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Jul 21, 2014 16:03
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GuyUpNorth posted:So if I got this right, Marauders are at best "point them at those guys" kind of deal if Mage/faction in question finds them at least beneficial in some way. Nephandi/Marauders are too unpredictable to have a standard response prepared. The Technocracy probably is organized enough for that sort of thing, but the Traditions are very much not. At best you'd identify the problem, call some buddies/more powerful contacts, and discuss the best way to remove the problem ASAP. Plus its not like Nephandi wear ID tags identifying themselves as such. Marauders can be a bit more obvious (or a LOT more obvious depending on their delusion) but even still it can take a while before you realize what's going on. And then you're either in crisis mode or carefully keeping your head down.
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Jul 21, 2014 16:27
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Tehan posted:And there you have it, one surprisingly coherent overarching cosmology. Wow. Thanks, this is all really cool. Can I be a pain and ask how everything came crashing down? I know we've talked about Caine returning and the Apocalypse destroying Gaia, but how do things shake out with the Umbra, the Mages, Lucifer and the Fae, etc? Wanderer posted:His cabal, the Butcher Street Irregulars, has a lot of friends among the various shapeshifters and does a lot of work in the WoD against genuinely evil dudes. Davenport is capable of leading these other Marauders, playing along with their own individual delusions, and turning them into an efficient team: they ferry magical creatures off of Earth to various Umbral realms so they won't die, they blow up Pentex facilities, they kill all sorts of demons and vampires, etc. Also a bunch of insane semi-benevolent(?) magical terrorists referencing the little kids who helped out Sherlock Holmes is delightful. 
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Jul 21, 2014 18:49
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GuyUpNorth posted:So if I got this right, Marauders are at best "point them at those guys" kind of deal if Mage/faction in question finds them at least beneficial in some way. No, at best they're "leave the area immediately" guys. Tradition mages are often in the least direct danger from the Marauders (since a lot of them are using an archaic enough magickal method that the Wyld isn't automatically pissed off at them), but since any Paradox the Marauder generates can backlash onto any other mage in the area, you're playing Russian roulette if you try to manipulate one.
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Jul 21, 2014 18:52
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fspades posted:Generic demon-worshipper bad guys are called infernalists. Nephandi literally want to destroy the universe. They are some of the most hosed up and irredeemable pieces of poo poo in the entire WoD, which is quite an accomplishment. Their avatars are turned inside out through a ritual and they use a different kind of magic as well. Most nephandi reside in the umbral realm and they serve demonic entities or alien beings known as Outer Lords. To put it in context with the both Worlds of Darkness: White Wolf does not gently caress around when it comes to "dark opposites". At some point, they realized that literally worshiping evil is generally not something actual people do, so there must be some degree of direct influence. Something that's an aberration in how reality itself works. In the case of Nephandi, they're opposites of everything that makes a Mage a Mage. Normal Mages seek mastery of the world around them, so Nephandi deliberately seek infenral employers to utterly debase them. Normal Mages create and alter with spells (even Entropy is simply toying with natural processes, with the intention of leaving the parts of what it's destroying intact so that something new can be built), so Nephandic magic is meant to destroy and corrupt (for instance, a Nephandic fireball is more properly a spherical area where cold has been annihilated). A normal Avatar seeks to Ascend and become a being of pure thought that transcends all limits, so a corrupted Avatar seeks Oblivion and annihilate it's selfhood completely so that it feels nothing but endless sensation. Whereas a normal human has a conscience that tells them "hey, that felt bad, maybe I shouldn't do it again," a Nephandi has one that tells them "hey, that felt bad, I should do it again so I become desensitized to it in the future." In contrast, the closest thing to Nephandi from the NWoD, the Scelesti? Yes, they worship the Abyss, the broken pseudo-reality that is the source of all Paradox. They do this because the Abyss happily repays their service, and because most have been dealt such a poo poo hand in life that they've come to believe that "a happy, peaceful life" is itself a Paradox that has no place in the world they live in, so they want the Abyss to devour the world and create a literally impossible utopia. Hell, the most prominent big boss archmaster of the Scelesti in general, Theumiel, is explicitly a pacifist who bought his commemorative "I heart R'lyeh" t-shirt when he realized that the spirit world is the living embodiment of natural selection, and that people keep on becoming collateral damage in the spirits' constant war for King rear end in a top hat of the Food Chain. So he wants the Abyss to devour said spirit world and replace it with the most Lovecraftian hippie fantasy ever. Nephandi, on the other hand? Reward is simply a new tool through which they might serve their Dark Masters better. For them, service is the whole point, the Path of Screams that leads one to becoming King rear end in a top hat of the Food Chain's Even Worse Vizier, the one most damned out of the entire rotting world, and given authority to abuse the less damned. There is nothing about their soul that resembles a human any more, even a broken, semi-psychotic one. It's kind of a misnomer to call them evil as well, because evil implies that someone is at least looking out for themselves above all else. A Nephandi looks out for himself only in that if he's dead, or better for the rest of existence, Gilguled, he won't be able to make the world a worse place any more. Erebro fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Jul 21, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 21:00
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HaitianDivorce posted:Wow. Thanks, this is all really cool. Can I be a pain and ask how everything came crashing down? I know we've talked about Caine returning and the Apocalypse destroying Gaia, but how do things shake out with the Umbra, the Mages, Lucifer and the Fae, etc? The smaller game lines' apocalypses were all covered in one book, Time of Judgment. I've only read it once and I didn't get a hell of a lot out of it. For Mage, the general idea behind the third edition is that the Technocracy flat-out won while nobody was looking, and everything players do from that point forward is just playing out the string. The old support networks are cut due to the Avatar Storm, a sudden phenomenon that makes it difficult and lethal for mages to leave Earth, so everyone left planetside is forced to rely on themselves. Ascension takes off from that for its scenarios, and like the other big fun books of ending the world, presents them as multiple-choice. One involves the reincarnation of a famous traitor from the early days of the Traditions, who inadvertently sets off the last open battles of the Ascension War; one is about an impending asteroid impact on Earth and the attempt to stop it; one is about the possible death of magick itself; and the last one, which was mentioned earlier, starts from the idea that most of mages' history and philosophy revolves around a very long game being run by one of the most powerful Nephandi to ever exist, who's coming back to turn Earth into a suburb of Hell. I have some very real problems with Mage's third edition and Ascension embodies a lot of them. Third edition just isn't very fun; it comes off like a deliberate attempt to remove some of the crazier aspects of the game (visiting weird spirit realms at the drop of a hat, space travel, crazy mages in centuries-old Horizon Realms, etc.) in favor of bringing it thematically closer to the "you're doomed; what now" mood set by Vampire and Werewolf. Even the books' color palette darkens dramatically; you go from the shiny foil covers of the first/second-edition Tradition books to murky CGI against a dark purple background. I agree with the general thrust of the "Time of Judgment" books; when you've built your entire game line on the concept of the imminent end of the world, you have to put up or shut up sooner or later. Mage in general doesn't lend itself to a single end, though, unless that end is the permanent and irrevocable extinction of the human race. Even if you ran a scenario where somebody or another disintegrates Earth, there are perfectly viable colonies scattered throughout the Umbra and the rest of the solar system thanks to mages. HaitianDivorce posted:Also a bunch of insane semi-benevolent(?) magical terrorists referencing the little kids who helped out Sherlock Holmes is delightful. The book that introduces the Irregulars has their story narrated by a Corax wereraven, who's under the impression that the Irregulars are sunshine and lollipops forever, and that's colored a lot of players' reaction to the Marauders as a faction. Davenport is sane enough to have a crew and a plan, and much of what we're told he does is laudable in the larger context, but Marauders in general do not go in for the surgical strike. Attacking a Technocrat stronghold sounds like a good plan on paper, but you're going to chop up a lot of Sleepers and non-powered operatives in the crossfire. They may be working for the greater good, but even the Irregulars, nice as they may be, have a body count like a small natural disaster. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Jul 21, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 21:11
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HaitianDivorce posted:Wow. Thanks, this is all really cool. Can I be a pain and ask how everything came crashing down? I know we've talked about Caine returning and the Apocalypse destroying Gaia, but how do things shake out with the Umbra, the Mages, Lucifer and the Fae, etc? The endings are all multiple-choice and leave a lot to STs to decide. Each line had about a half-dozen possible end scenarios, each with a lot of room for STs to customize - one of the Werewolf ones had a second tribe fall to the Wyrm, but left it up to the ST which one and gave plausible scenarios for each one doing so. So unlike the origins, where there's actual concrete facts you can get a general feel for by wading through countless different accounts twisted by oral traditions, cultural pollution, bias and agendas, there's no real concrete facts about the end-time except for poo poo's hosed, Yo.
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Jul 21, 2014 21:40
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HaitianDivorce posted:Wow. Thanks, this is all really cool. Can I be a pain and ask how everything came crashing down? I know we've talked about Caine returning and the Apocalypse destroying Gaia, but how do things shake out with the Umbra, the Mages, Lucifer and the Fae, etc? The meta-plot reasoning behind all the various apocalypses was that total destruction and rebirth is just another stage on the cycle of creation. God turns away, the supernatural gets out of hand, Hell takes over for a while, everything is scoured away, then the rebuilding starts. So the Aether Storm, the Final Nights, the Apocalypse, Armageddon, Wraith turning into Orpheus, &c &c, it all happens at the same time because it's time. The world is Noah's Flood levels of boned. Out with the old, in with the new.
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Jul 21, 2014 22:35
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Is there a place that has the details of the specific scenarios, as I'm curious about them but I'm only finding vague details and bits like 'Sam Haight is an ashtray'.
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Jul 21, 2014 22:41
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Ghostwoods posted:The meta-plot reasoning behind all the various apocalypses was that total destruction and rebirth is just another stage on the cycle of creation. God turns away, the supernatural gets out of hand, Hell takes over for a while, everything is scoured away, then the rebuilding starts. So the Aether Storm, the Final Nights, the Apocalypse, Armageddon, Wraith turning into Orpheus, &c &c, it all happens at the same time because it's time. The world is Noah's Flood levels of boned. Out with the old, in with the new. ...if you want. There's at least one scenario in each of the books that is straight-up "the world is a cinder, game over, you lost."
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Jul 21, 2014 22:48
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Yeah, WW made numerous variants of the Apocalypse scenarios the OWoD was building towards when they finally decided "welp, no sense putting off this looming apocalypse we've been building up this whole time" and bit the bullet. Compare this to the Games Workshop approach of just asymptotically approaching the end of everything 
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Jul 21, 2014 22:53
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I have to admit that I didn't end up using any of the options that WW presented for Gehenna in my old V:TM campaign, but some of them were pretty interesting. I always wanted to play through the balls-to-the-wall, "HOLY poo poo THE ANTEDILUVIANS ARE ALL RISING TO WRECK OUR poo poo!!" scenario, but I never had a chance.
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Jul 21, 2014 22:57
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My favorite moment in any of the Gehenna scenarios remains the bit in one of them where the Settites get together as a clan and put on the greatest show in their history, with sacrifices and rituals and all manner of pomp and circumstance to welcome Set back to the world... ...and they get a dial tone. No Ancestor Here, Please Try Again Later. Set's been dead as hell this entire time and they've been bastards for millennia for no reason whatsoever.
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Jul 21, 2014 23:15
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GuyUpNorth posted:So if I got this right, Marauders are at best "point them at those guys" kind of deal if Mage/faction in question finds them at least beneficial in some way. Actually, "Come, let's fight the true enemy together" is probably the oldest trick in Nephandi book. There is no better way for the Fallen to convince a prospective recruit that they are not so bad after all. Unfortunately, their help is never worth the price and will probably either get you killed by your (former at this point) friends, or turned barabbi. Nephandi are like Ebola - the situation is never serious enough to use them.
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Jul 21, 2014 23:21
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Shugojin posted:Yeah, WW made numerous variants of the Apocalypse scenarios the OWoD was building towards when they finally decided "welp, no sense putting off this looming apocalypse we've been building up this whole time" and bit the bullet. Compare this to the Games Workshop approach of just asymptotically approaching the end of everything It was that and also there was the problem of all this metaplot poo poo we're talking about was frankly getting out of control. WoD had dozens of writers over the decade, each bringing their conflicting Grand Theory Of Everything to the table. Nobody knew the direction they were going and the revised editions badly floundered as a result. There was also the problem of the world not being in the 90's anymore. Many themes of the early editions that remained in the core of WoD sounded more and more silly over time. Seriously, take a look at 1st ed. Mage: the Ascension sometime. It's hilarious but it was also really cool when Vertigo comics were all the rage. So they did the reasonable thing and put the drat thing out of its misery. They started over and this time they were going to avoid the pitfalls of the predecessor. Clear, balanced rules; a long-term plan for the franchise; no overbearing metaplot; greater creative freedom for story-tellers; no grand political stands; no hideous ethnic stereotypes and so on. And they mostly succeeded. The new game lines are great. Too bad tabletop role-playing is dead, so nobody plays them v v (ask me about my Promethean book).
fspades fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Jul 21, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 23:39
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Zeroisanumber posted:I have to admit that I didn't end up using any of the options that WW presented for Gehenna in my old V:TM campaign, but some of them were pretty interesting. I always wanted to play through the balls-to-the-wall, "HOLY poo poo THE ANTEDILUVIANS ARE ALL RISING TO WRECK OUR poo poo!!" scenario, but I never had a chance. This is going to sound incredibly ignorant but.. Why are the antediluvians so hell-bent on destroying their own clans when they awaken? Shouldn't the clans be, well.. Happy to have their oldest and most powerful return?
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Jul 21, 2014 23:48
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fspades posted:They started over and this time they were going to avoid the pitfalls of the predecessor. Clear, balanced rules; a long-term plan for the franchise; no overbearing metaplot; greater creative freedom for story-tellers; no grand political stands; no hideous ethnic stereotypes and so on. And they mostly succeeded. The new game lines are great. The new game lines are clean and slick and gleaming and beautiful and I hate them for it. oWoD may have had some dark corners and rough edges but it's a world you can just keep exploring and never stop finding nooks and crannies to poke around in. It has, for lack of better term, soul.
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Jul 21, 2014 23:53
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I find nWoD boring compared to oWoD. It may just be my nostalgia talking though since when I used to play oWoD I was a stupid teen.
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Jul 22, 2014 00:01
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Vagon posted:This is going to sound incredibly ignorant but.. Why are the antediluvians so hell-bent on destroying their own clans when they awaken? Shouldn't the clans be, well.. Happy to have their oldest and most powerful return? As vampires age, they lose the ability to subsist on weak blood. First, the blood of animals stops nourishing them, then (many hundreds or thousands of years later) human blood stops working as well and they're forced to drink the blood of other vampires to survive. This is called "Methuselah's Thirst" because it generally starts to effect a vampire at around age 1000. For Antediluvians, the weak blood of young, high-generation vampires doesn't sustain them anymore and they can only feed on the blood of Methuselahs. The oldest of the elders and the Methuselahs are the real movers and shakers in vampire society. They're the ones who are awake to accrue power and pull all of the strings. Rather than meekly be devoured by their elders, they fight with every tool at their disposal.
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Jul 22, 2014 00:05
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fspades posted:It was that and also there was the problem of all this metaplot poo poo we're talking about was frankly getting out of control. WoD had dozens of writers over the decade, each bringing their conflicting Grand Theory Of Everything to the table. Nobody knew the direction they were going and the revised editions badly floundered as a result. There was also the problem of the world not being in the 90's anymore. Many themes of the early editions that remained in the core of WoD sounded more and more silly over time. Seriously, take a look at 1st ed. Mage: the Ascension sometime. It's hilarious but it was also really cool when Vertigo comics were all the rage. What is a Promethean and why does it conjure images of Frankenstein in my head?
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Jul 22, 2014 00:13
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Vagon posted:This is going to sound incredibly ignorant but.. Why are the antediluvians so hell-bent on destroying their own clans when they awaken? Shouldn't the clans be, well.. Happy to have their oldest and most powerful return? They are very thirsty and human blood doesn't cut it anymore. Also they wouldn't like what the youngsters did with the place. Tehan posted:The new game lines are clean and slick and gleaming and beautiful and I hate them for it. oWoD may have had some dark corners and rough edges but it's a world you can just keep exploring and never stop finding nooks and crannies to poke around in. It has, for lack of better term, soul. That was a common complaint when the game lines were first released but really doesn't hold water anymore, at least in my opinion. There are a million of interesting things going on nWoD. Ancient conspiracies, weird mysteries, old feuds and of course, the arcane workings of the God-Machine... There is a lot to explore.
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Jul 22, 2014 00:16
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xanthan posted:What is a Promethean and why does it conjure images of Frankenstein in my head? You more or less answered your own question there. e: I was gonna add some more to this 'cause in retrospect my post was a bit flippant, but fspades does a better job of it than I could have. Gedt fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 00:26
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Kanthulhu posted:I find nWoD boring compared to oWoD. It may just be my nostalgia talking though since when I used to play oWoD I was a stupid teen. Tehan posted:The new game lines are clean and slick and gleaming and beautiful and I hate them for it. oWoD may have had some dark corners and rough edges but it's a world you can just keep exploring and never stop finding nooks and crannies to poke around in. It has, for lack of better term, soul. I never really gave nWoD a chance because I was, and apparently remain, heavily invested in the old WoD. People keep telling me it's a better system, but I've had a hard time finding stable tabletop groups since I There's still a lot about the original Storyteller system that I really appreciate, though, especially coming out of a AD&D background as I did. It's very fluid and easy to learn, and anything you want to do is just Attribute + Ability, done. You don't need to burn a feat on it or whatever-the-gently caress, you can just try it. When I was younger, that was goddamned mind-blowing. We used to make an informal game out of figuring out the weirdest possible attribute/ability combination that would still do something useful. (Charisma + Computer: seduce your internet girlfriend. Strength + Stealth: climb a sheer surface without anyone hearing you carving out handholds as you go with your claws. Stamina + Subterfuge: act like you're not quite as in shape as you actually are.) fspades posted:It was that and also there was the problem of all this metaplot poo poo we're talking about was frankly getting out of control. WoD had dozens of writers over the decade, each bringing their conflicting Grand Theory Of Everything to the table. Nobody knew the direction they were going and the revised editions badly floundered as a result. There was also the problem of the world not being in the 90's anymore. Many themes of the early editions that remained in the core of WoD sounded more and more silly over time. Seriously, take a look at 1st ed. Mage: the Ascension sometime. It's hilarious but it was also really cool when Vertigo comics were all the rage. Yeah, as has been pointed out a few times in the thread, the entire setting is very much a product of its times. Mage in particular has several books in first and third edition that are virtually unreadable (although one must give it credit; the fiction that opens the first edition core rulebook for Mage is about a kid with a trenchcoat and a katana meeting his new master and being told that his possession of those two things simultaneously makes him the world's biggest rear end in a top hat). Werewolf is very rough early on, there's a lot of thematic creep over the course of all three core games' main books, and the computer/technology obsession in both Mage and Werewolf flat-out would not exist without the mid-nineties and how it fell in love with cyberpunk for about ten minutes. I also think the entire World of Darkness was born out of Mark Rein*Hagen giving RPG fans and roleplaying in general way too much credit. He wanted people to get together and tell stories about dark, obsessive things, attempting to scare each other, and instead you end up with 8th-generation Caitiff who took Potence, Celerity, and Fortitude as their "clan disciplines." Still, there's more than enough good stuff in the game and its world that I can't hate it, even today. It's not like it's an accident that you can walk into any bookstore in the world today and find, at a guess, two hundred separate series about the seedy supernatural underbelly of urban living, each one complete with its own terminology. The Dresden Files in particular can be translated almost directly onto Mage with a thoroughness and ease that suggests some degree of deliberation. (I don't think that all the urban fantasy in the world goes straight back to the oWoD, but it'd be stupid to pretend there's no connection there. It's probably more like '90s pop culture "now you are the monster" trend -> WoD -> "Kindred: The Embraced" -> the Underworld movies -> Anita Blake/Dresden Files -> legion of imitators.) So yeah, I am really on board for Mage 20th.
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Jul 22, 2014 00:29
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xanthan posted:What is a Promethean and why does it conjure images of Frankenstein in my head? Because it's Frankenstein's Monster: the Game and it's awesome. Prometheans are unnatural, sentient constructs that are an offense to God, man and the universe itself. There are a very small number of them and and they constantly move around because they always inevitably get chased by pitchforks when they stay somewhere for too long, along with other bad things. So, they want to become human; Just an ordinary life with an ordinary place they can call home. And the interesting thing is, you can achieve that and the game has mechanics for that. Promethean is the only game in WoD with a win condition. The problem is, it is a really emotionally intense game wrestling with questions about human condition, so it's an intimidating game to actually play. "The best role playing game nobody has played" is an often made description.
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Jul 22, 2014 00:32
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How you become human and "win" would be a good place to start on it I guess. Or the various clans/tribes/traditions/insertothergamelinspecificterm for Prometheans. Someone also mentioned changelings earlier. I think I remember hearing about them before and how it was most hopeful or something part of the OWoD, vs the NWoD equivalent which was a lot darker or something. Fantastic Alice fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 00:38
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Vagon posted:This is going to sound incredibly ignorant but.. Why are the antediluvians so hell-bent on destroying their own clans when they awaken? Shouldn't the clans be, well.. Happy to have their oldest and most powerful return? Imagine that one day you go to sleep. Then the next day you wake up and everyone related to you is a literally a bloodsucking rear end in a top hat who insists you don't exist. On top of that, they secretly lust for your position and power, and will literally murder you in your sleep to get it. And they even went so far as aggressively burning any remnant of your history out of the books in a preemptive attempt to kill you. Also, you yourself may or may not also be a bloodsucking rear end in a top hat who went so far into your own assholery that you came out the other side looking like something out of Lovecraft's pantheon of elder gods. Now imagine you've got eight or maybe twelve equally psychotic brothers and sisters who look at your grandchildren and even each other like they're all ants, and they're the kids with a magnifying glass. And all of them want to eat you and lust for your power and position because while they may be demigods they're also mostly batshit crazy motherfuckers who dream of supplanting god himself and remaking existence in their image. Also, each of them has gone so far into their assholery that they came out the other side looking like something out of Lovecraft's pantheon of elder gods. Now imagine all these eldritch jackasses start waking up and start running all hulkamania on the world like Godzilla in Tokyo. And they've been aware of all of this even while asleep (and in fact were subtly manipulating each clan to their downfall the entire time) for millenia. Since, you see, the rules about feeding still apply, but they're so old that human blood just doesn't do it for them anymore. So they don't think much of their own grandchildren either. In fact they kind of look at them like a normal person would a fine vintage of wine. So most of them have been cultivating their own bloodlines like you might a garden. And between all of the chaotic craziness that results from that you've got the Antediluvian's own grandfather quietly face palming in the background at what his grandchildren are doing to the world. All while silently praying for a death that will never come. Since Caine originally hosed up by murdering his brother, and the Antediluvians themselves did the same thing by cannibalizing the first generation. Only the Antediluvians don't feel the slightest shred of remorse over what they did, since hey, crazy rear end demigods. That's basically the cause of Gehenna in a nutshell, which is a big part of understanding why the Antediluvians are so villainous and messed up in the head. Suffice to say that Antediluvians have some issues. After a certain point vampiric bloodlines in this setting get so old that they they have to turn into one big dysfunctional auto-cannibalistic family if they want to keep going. The Antediluvians are what happen when you put that concept into practice. Edit: Oh, and it's not touched on much, but it's sort of a thing where devouring another vampire in this setting probably ingests their soul too. And the ingested soul can gently caress with the ingester if it's a lower generation or more powerful than the person that ate it. So they probably all have the shrieking remnants of the first generation still stuck inside their heads, since even Tremere wasn't able to digest Saulot after a few hundred years. So if they weren't trying to take over the world they've mostly been asleep or trapped in coffins for millions of years with nothing but a bunch of ancient angry vampire ghosts to torment them. So even the nicest Antediluvian is probably pretty bugfuck crazy to begin with. Archonex fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 00:47
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I like some of the new WoD stuff (Changeling especially), but I could never get into Vampire: the Requiem. It just isn't as wacky and over-the-top as Vampire: the Masquerade, and it felt like it actually takes itself seriously (did anyone not dumb or crazy ever take "gothic punk" seriously?). Drama versus melodrama--I find it really dry. But then, V:tM was the game I played the most as a dumb teen, so I was the most invested in it. Since Wanderer mentioned it, I figure I should say this:  DO NOT ATTEMPT TO WATCH KINDRED: THE EMBRACED. EVER. It is abjectly terrible. And not even in a funny way.
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Jul 22, 2014 01:18
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Stroop There It Is posted:Since Wanderer mentioned it, I figure I should say this: It's weird, but the guy who played the protagonist of that show was killed a couple of years later in a motorcycle accident. He was decapitated. I wonder how many people worked that into their Vampire chronicles somehow. As a coverup for an assassination, the plot writes itself.
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Jul 22, 2014 01:27
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