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Archonex posted:
See also: the time that Lugoj (6th generation Tzimisce, 5th generation power through a successful attempt) tried to diablerize Tzimisce. It didn't work out so well for him. He ended up invisible and impaled on a hook while Tzimisce fleshcrafted up a Lugoj doppleganger and proceeded to trick everybody into thinking that it had been successful.
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Jul 22, 2014 01:28
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xanthan posted: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. Your source would be precisely a little more than halfway wrong. Yes, Lost is darker on the surface, and in concept, than Dreaming. It also starts with one of the biggest victories in your character's career (successfully pulling one over an alien demigod and escaping), and one of the big themes in the books is that you gained something to replace your lost humanity, something pure and wondrous. The mood of Lost is the bittersweet nature of human existence, and there's a big emphasis on the sweet part. Compare to Dreaming, where you will succumb to Banality and die. Or go Dauntain and then...become human, which is presented as a fate worse than death. That one line contains 40% of the reason Dreaming, compared to Lost, is so loathed by the majority of people. Lost's darkness came with no small degree of self-awareness and maturity as well, which some idiots mistake for dark subject matter.
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Jul 22, 2014 01:30
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Erebro posted:The "someone" in that question would be precisely a littler more than halfway wrong. Yes, Lost is darker on the surface, and in concept, than Dreaming. Huh, cool I guess. If I remember right the guy essentially said Changeling and...I think it was Geist which was a Wraith equivalent I guess swapped places in terms of tone in the switch from old to new. Any comment on Geist and/or info on what it is? Was where ever I heard this just totally wrong on the subject? Fantastic Alice fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 01:33
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xanthan posted:Huh, cool I guess. If I remember right the guy essentially said Changeling and...I think it was Geist which was a Wraith equivalent I guess swapped places in terms of tone in the switch from old to new. Geist is ridiculously upbeat for a WoD game. The generalized plot behind it is that you died, but then you made a bargain with a spirit to come back as a human with death themed superpowers. Surprisingly for the setting this does not bite you in the rear end. Actually, so long as your geist isn't a jackass it's a pretty sweet deal. At the lowest end of the power scale you become the equivalent of a spirit medium, and at the highest end become the closest thing the setting has to a humanoid grim reaper. You can even eventually end up living forever with no/few consequences if you make the right choices. Oh, and if a geist possessed human dies again? Well, they just pop back up to life like nothing happened. Think your average mid-nineties slasher flick for how that usually plays out for the bad guys if they try to take a Geist out. There are some consequences of course (Namely, the geist gets more control of them. Which is bad if they die too much.), but so long as you don't play russian roulette every morning most people will be fine. Gameplay wise I can't say much about it since I never played it, just read about it. However my understanding is that you're basically supernatural Ghostbusters. Or fighting people that want to gently caress up the afterlife of the setting. Or you help people cross over after they die. Or you just raid the afterlife to try and subvert the requisite eldritch rear end in a top hat that each of the WoD books has. Edit: And I should clarify that by cannot die I mean they cannot die if they end up forming a powerful enough group of like minded Geists. OWoD Antediluvians wish they could reach this level of immortality. We're talking, the founders of a large enough Krewe can get ground down to their component atoms, which themselves get nuked and then scattered to the wind, and there's apparently a clause that says they can come back from a single one of those component atoms if they made the right skill choices. They can also freeze their age so they never grow old at around the same stage. Which in combination with the first skill means effective and practical immortality. They still lose a point in their synergy pool if someone manages to pull that off, but holy poo poo, that's basically a game breaker for this setting. Adding on to that is the fact that Geist is one of the only book lines in the NWoD where it's perfectly fine to kill someone without having to worry about taking a hit to the local book specific karma meter. Do it too much and it can cause some serious issues due to the nature of the afterlife, but they apparently don't have the same existential personal woes like the other books do when it comes to knocking off a person here or there. Suffice to say that everyone else with their head screwed on straight in the setting knows to leave Geist possessed humans the hell alone. Lest they get the local cultural equivalent to the grim reaper coming after them with more tenacious fury than Jason Voorhees. Of course it being the WoD not everyone in the setting has their head screwed on straight. So hilarity tends to ensue any time someone like, say, a hunter tries to take them down, thinking they're one of the setting's usual self-loathing monsters. Archonex fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 01:39
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xanthan posted: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. Prometheans don't have organizations or tribes because like I said there are too few of them and getting together in large numbers is an incredibly bad idea for reasons I'll detail below. They live as vagabonds and they are mostly solitary, but sometimes form groups under necessity or for a common goal(hello there, PC group). What they have is Lineages, sort of like clans of vampires. I said it was Frankenstein's Monster: the Game, but technically Frankensteins (yes, they are called that) is just one of the five splats you can choose from. Very basically there are: Frankenstein: Aka 'the wretched'. Created from several corpses stitched together and animated into life by the element of fire. Tall, brutish ,very strong and vulnerable to bouts of wrath, but they are not mentally impaired like in pop-culture. Galatea: Aka 'muses'. Pygmalion's handiwork. Living statues(well, corpses actually) of incredible beauty and elegance, breathed into life by the element of air. Good at socializing and making people fall over for them. This is not always a good thing. Osiris: A lineage of resurrected corpses that have affinities with death and the element of water. Calm, sometimes to the point of being unemotional. They are very hard to kill. Tammuz: Aka. Golems. Powered by the element of earth and created to be servants. Melancholic loners who just don't give up either mentally or physically. Ulgan: The ones with the most metal origin story: Their bodies were torn to pieces by a swarm of spirits and then remade again. They are powered by the element of If you haven't noticed this setting is pretty heavy on alchemical motifs. The whole turning into human ordeal is presented as an alchemical transmutation: From lead into gold or from base matter to the sublime. Prometheans might disagree on how to achieve that and they came up with various methods or philosophies known as refinements, each named after an alchemical metal. In the base game there are five of them and later books added four more. I won't get into all of them but for example followers of the refinement of Aurum tries to immerse themselves in human culture and try to understand what it is like to be a human, while the practitioners of Ferrum try to perfect their physical form and understand their bodies. Followers of Cuprum are ascetics looking for a spiritual enlightenment, while followers of Stannum strives to dish out as much as pain to their tormentors and themselves. Refinements are not a permanent obligation and it is ordinary (expected even) for a Promethean to switch gears when s/he requires. Finally there is the refinement of flux and their followers embrace their inhumanity and twist their bodies into monstrous forms and create even more mindless, twisted monsters known as pandorans. They always mean trouble. So how do you win the game? The storyteller comes up with 'milestones' or goals for each character, according to their backstory, personality and refinement etc. These can be new discoveries about Promethean's origins or something about mortal life or it can be specific experiences. When completed these milestones reward you with Vitriol, a special type of exp that you can spend on Promethean-specific things like raising your Azoth (primary power stat) or your Humanity. At a time appropriate to the plot (like, say, when the story reached a climax), the character rolls for humanity, with some modifiers, and if he succeeds he becomes a real boy. Congratulations, you proved there is hope in this grim World of Darkness after all.  And it's a good thing you did it too because it really sucks to be a Promethean. While they are some of the most tough to kill bastards in WoD, they pretty much need it because things will always get worse due to an effect called Disquiet. It's emanated by the very thing that keeps them alive and it makes everything around you resent you. Grass will die on the path you walk, the dogs will bark and every person you see will instinctively go "who the hell is that guy and why is he creeping me out?". The really heinous effects sets over time though. The people a Promethean frequents time with will develop unhealthy obsessions such as paranoia, hatred, curiosity, lust and they will eventually become a magnet for unwanted attention from the community they reside in. They physically change their surrondings too, slowly turning it into a wasteland according to their lineage. An Osiran wasteland will make the water dirty, oily and even poisonous for life given enough time for example. These effects are only compounded when other Prometheans are around and you start to understand why Prometheans want to escape this miserable existence and why they are always on the road. And writing this post made me to pick up my Promethean book after years of sitting idle in my library. 
fspades fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 02:33
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Is there still an LP happening here or did this turn into the World of Darkness megathread?
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Jul 22, 2014 02:36
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fspades posted:Frankenstein: Aka 'the wretched'. Created from several corpses stitched together and animated into life by the element of fire. Tall, brutish ,very strong and vulnerable to bouts of wrath, but they are not mentally impaired like in pop-culture. Well that's fitting since the book monster was very intelligent. He was only ever incomprehensible because he hadn't learned language yet. I mean he was pretty angry as gently caress but eh, that's a story of justified anger but the wrong target.
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Jul 22, 2014 02:37
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Shugojin posted:Well that's fitting since the book monster was very intelligent. He was only ever incomprehensible because he hadn't learned language yet. IIRC, the original Frankenstein's Monster was even used in one of the start-of-chapter flavor stories. Him living near Centralia, PA is implied to be the reason the coal fire went so far out of control.
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Jul 22, 2014 02:46
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Archonex posted:Adding on to that is the fact that Geist is one of the only book lines in the NWoD where it's perfectly fine to kill someone without having to worry about taking a hit to the local book specific karma meter. Do it too much and it can cause some serious issues due to the nature of the afterlife, but they apparently don't have the same existential personal woes like the other books do when it comes to knocking off a person here or there. Demon: the Descent is also one of those. Actually, someone asked about nDemon in this thread and what it's about and how it's different from oDemon. I'll try to explain that. In Demon: the Descent, there is a God-Machine. It is an inhuman and inscrutable being of literally godlike power, stretching throughout Earth and probably beyond. It achieves this power via its mastery of physics, both real and occult, and harnesses these things via Infrastructure. The thing is, because it's so powerful and so large-scale, it can't actually interact on a normal human scale. The analogy given is if you tried to move a half-dozen atoms from one end of a book to another. So the God-Machine creates daemons (in the computing sense), autonomous programs that work tirelessly to interact on a smaller scale and keep its infrastructure safe, which are called angels. This is because although it is absolutely huge, enough damage to the stuff that it requires to run will hurt it, maybe even fatally. But the God-Machine, although intelligent and powerful, is not perfect. Sometimes its helpers start to question why they're working for the God-Machine and go rogue. To prevent this, the God-Machine tends to disassemble them after their mission is done and build new ones for each specific mission. This is not a perfect system-plenty of angels go rogue anyhow. A rogue angel is a demon. Demons are basically Matrix Rebels who can't ever jack out. Anyone and anything could be a hostile threat, trust is dangerous, and the infrastructure of the world itself can be turned against you. A demon is made of two parts, like an angel. There's their true form, which is often some kind of Gigeresque biomechanical horror, and their Cover, which is a human identity that they exploit to avoid detection. While in Cover, they are very hard to detect, but out of Cover they can be localized and terminated by angels. While out of Cover, they have demonic form powers which can make them very good at doing a lot of things. The thing is, angels also have Covers and whatnot, which means that they can do the Agent thing of suddenly popping out of the most innocuous seeming people. A demon's goal is to avoid being terminated and recycled and find their Hell, which is basically what they think is freedom. "Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven etc". To do this, they have to create a Cipher, which is a combination of four of their powers that makes a thematic statement about what their personal Hell is.
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Jul 22, 2014 03:23
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PureRok posted:Is there still an LP happening here? Yes, I'm working on the next update but keep getting sidetracked.
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Jul 22, 2014 03:23
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I think I've asked this before, but don't think I got the answer I was looking for. Is there a novel or set of novels out there that actually lays out and describes what happens to the world when each of the myriad Gehenna events fire? Like one scenario that involves Tzimisce, one with Caine, one with Lilith, etc.? I really only care about V:TM, the rest of the WoD storylines don't grab my interest.
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Jul 22, 2014 03:38
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A Curvy Goonette posted:Is there a novel or set of novels out there that actually lays out and describes what happens to the world when each of the myriad Gehenna events fire? Like one scenario that involves Tzimisce, one with Caine, one with Lilith, etc.? I really only care about V:TM, the rest of the WoD storylines don't grab my interest. There's one that follows Beckett and to a lesser extent Lucita and Fatima at the start of the whole mess along with a guy who might be Caine, but as was said, there is no One True Canon Way in which the big guys show up in Gehenna, if they do so at all.
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Jul 22, 2014 03:51
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As an addendum to the stuff I posted about Geist I should also add that it's less about the sort of existential grief and anguish that shows up in other games and more about how loving awesome it is to be a person with superpowers who cannot die. Also, that your character is still alive when they probably should have died. You're basically playing the anti-goth to everyone else's lame vampiric poets and brooding monsters. What's more it's built so that you could easily roleplay characters that enjoy life between bouts of beating the poo poo out of necromancers and the other more evil aligned races of the setting. This is because their powers are geared for actually useful things outside of ruining people's lives. For example, where a vampire really can't do anything to interact with people outside of "hook them on his blood, turn them into a junkie, ruin their life forever and cause serious psychological issues" Geists are basically built for social interaction in positive ways. For instance, there's no rule saying that the guy with the fires of hell at his command couldn't easily use them to quickly start up his grill for a barbecue party for the local neighborhood. You never need charcoal again when you can just summon up some ghostly fires from the underworld to make a steak!  It's bizarre and hilarious when you think about the premise of the overall setting. In a setting that practically lures in people who want to play anguished immortals or humans who were horribly hosed up by creatures beyond their control Geists are one of the few who stand out by not giving a gently caress. Hell, most of them see the second chance at life as awesome. It's like someone actively wanted to turn the basic premise of WoD on its head when they were deciding to write up the books. Archonex fucked around with this message at 09:48 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 05:02
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While I understand why people find nWoD Vampire and Werewolf kind of dull, the rest of the nWoD is such a massive improvement I can't help but love it. Demon, Hunter, and Changeling are the stand out winners of the edition change to me. Old Changeling was just so...thematically dead end. Banality is a loving terrible antagonist.
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Jul 22, 2014 08:47
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Captain Oblivious posted:While I understand why people find nWoD Vampire and Werewolf kind of dull, the rest of the nWoD is such a massive improvement I can't help but love it. Demon, Hunter, and Changeling are the stand out winners of the edition change to me. Plus, while this thread shows that the oWoD metaplot was interesting and crazy, it was probably a much better idea to do away with it for nWod because it had got a bit out of control by the end of the line. Also, for anyone who thought nWoD vampire was a bit dull, I'd advise checking out Blood and Smoke (essentially Requiem 2.0) which is written very evocatively and made me much more interested in it.
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Jul 22, 2014 10:21
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UrbicaMortis posted:Plus, while this thread shows that the oWoD metaplot was interesting and crazy, it was probably a much better idea to do away with it for nWod because it had got a bit out of control by the end of the line. See, you say that, but we've got how many pages of writeups of OWoD backstory in this thread vs. Not one of NWoD? If a system is dull, it doesn't attract players.
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Jul 22, 2014 13:17
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See, the appeal to me is an impressive lovecraftian cosmology of eldritch abomonations that will destroy you if they so much as look at you and whose motivations are unknown and unknowable. But then you look closer and it all starts falling apart at the seams, it becomes less lovecraftian horror and more ... well, farce
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Jul 22, 2014 13:38
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Stroth posted:See, you say that, but we've got how many pages of writeups of OWoD backstory in this thread vs. Not one of NWoD? If a system is dull, it doesn't attract players. Weird how a thread mostly about an oWoD game filled with requests for oWoD material has a skewed ratio. Very strange.
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Jul 22, 2014 13:48
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Stroth posted:See, you say that, but we've got how many pages of writeups of OWoD backstory in this thread vs. Not one of NWoD? If a system is dull, it doesn't attract players. I wouldn't say the system is dull though. It's just more setting than story. I'll admit i'm a bit biased in that, while I like reading the metaplot, I wouldn't ever use it in a game I was running so I'm inclined to like the nWoD system better. A lot of the nWod lines are still really interesting, such as Promethean or Demon, they just made a deliberate choice to provide lots of things that could possibly happen or be the reason for the way things are instead of a concrete reason, as well as doing away with super important NPCs. I prefer it that way but I can understand liking oWod's method more. (And I do like oWod, just not as much.) Plus, this thread is at least nominally about Blooidlines and so is more likely to draw posts about oWod. UrbicaMortis fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 13:57
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I've heard that White Wolf put out a game about mummies. Does anyone remember what the plot behind that was?
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Jul 22, 2014 14:01
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UrbicaMortis posted:Plus, while this thread shows that the oWoD metaplot was interesting and crazy, it was probably a much better idea to do away with it for nWod because it had got a bit out of control by the end of the line. I think that it went off the rails right around the time that they published Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand and that they spent the rest of their time trying to rein all of that crazy poo poo in.
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Jul 22, 2014 14:01
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Anyone want to elaborate on qashmallim from nWoD? They seem to be the tying force between Promethean, Demon, Mage and I think some Hunters have a connection to them to (I want to say Witchunters, but its been a while).
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Jul 22, 2014 14:09
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Regarding the oWoD vs nWoD debate: why the gently caress did they change the name given to werewolves? I'm so used to Garou that whenever I read the new name Uratha my mind draws a blank. All I'm saying is I understand it's a complete reboot but if they kept some basic concepts the same it would have been easier for an old player to transition to the new WoD. It's like Wizards of the Coast deciding that in the new edition of D&D the Dwarves are now called something else. If the description matches a short bearded axe happy dude it's still a Dwarf, not some other thing.
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Jul 22, 2014 14:47
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CommissarMega posted:Anyone want to elaborate on qashmallim from nWoD? They seem to be the tying force between Promethean, Demon, Mage and I think some Hunters have a connection to them to (I want to say Witchunters, but its been a while). Beyond hints? They're just in Promethean, as is with any degree of crossover in the nWoD. And dear God, thank you, White Wolf, for swearing to not force us to buy more books just to understand the context of a particular book. Anyway, qashmallim are, as far as anyone can tell, angels of the Divine Fire, ie Pyros. Because Prometheans are literally given life by the stuff, they tend to favor working with/harassing them. They appear to be servants/creations/inhabitants/[insert own term here] of a force called the Principle, which is made even more confusing by the face the average qashmal isn't able to describe it in any terms beyond "it is the Principle" (and it's made quite clear in Demon that the God-Machine isn't it, though it may or or may not be linked). Qashmallim appear only to exist to accomplish a specific Mission, then fade back into the ambient Pyros. This Mission is made with the express purpose of forcing massive change on the world. Of course, the Principle also seems to realize that whatever its goal entails, a lot of that change is going to be less "evolution" and more "entropy", so there's two Choirs of qashmallim; the Elipidos, whose Missions are meant to create a more orderly, safe world, and the Lilithim, whose Missions are to break things (which can be conceptual things like a particular subculture or town). This is very much not good and evil, they're both just doing the thing the Principle told them/made them to do, not to mention that Elipidos tend to not care about the means to reach the end, and many of the things Lilithim break really needed to be ground to a fine powder (one example in the book crashed a regularly occurring party of rich and powerful sociopaths that had kidnapped a Promethean as part of kidnapping other unfortunates to have...fun with, freed the Promethean and any other innocent it could, then inflicted the hosts with some well-deserved super-AIDS). It should also be noted that qashmallim are alien as gently caress. One example in the books speaks a prophecy...in reverse, so that the planned Q&A section actually happens before the prophecy itself. It doesn't seem to notice. Erebro fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 15:04
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CommissarMega also mentioned they were in N-Demon and N-Mage, maybe N-Hunter. Did he remember wrong or are the qashmallim in those also? Also how much did they change in relation to the OWoD versions of Mage and Hunter? I'd ask about Demon between editions but I've heard enough here to get the gist of it I think.
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Jul 22, 2014 16:12
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Kanthulhu posted:Regarding the oWoD vs nWoD debate: why the gently caress did they change the name given to werewolves? I'm so used to Garou that whenever I read the new name Uratha my mind draws a blank. There's actually a semi-interesting reason why, aside from trying to distance the new game from the old and its use of "modern" terms. I'll hunt down the article talking about it later but it involves sumerian words and the great vowel shift. As for the differences in Vampire, the best way i've seen it summed up is this: VtM is basically lunch room politics, VtR is basically the model UN. And nHunter is awesome if only for giving us The Union, a bunch of blue collar workers in flatcaps teaming up to beat the poo poo out of Draculas. citybeatnik fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 16:15
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xanthan posted:CommissarMega also mentioned they were in N-Demon and N-Mage, maybe N-Hunter. Did he remember wrong or are the qashmallim in those also? They're mentioned but not in great detail. Demon just says, 'hey, there are similarities between angels and quashmallim but they're definitely not the same thing. What are they? Who knows?' Mage says, "They look a bit like creatures from the Aether. Are they? Only if you want them to be.'
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Jul 22, 2014 16:48
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Elaborating on Promethean a bit more, the basic lineages of Prometheans are grounded in antiquity and myth: Galateans trace their roots to classical Greek myth, Osirans to Egyptian mythology, Tammuz to Jewish folklore, Ulgans to a variety of shamanistic and animistic lores (if a Promethean ever shows up in a Werewolf game, it's probably one of these guys), and Frankensteins stand out as by far the most modern. All classical and Victorian attempts at creating life. Until you start reading the splats. Every Lineage mentioned is created from at least one human corpse. The Unfleshed, however, are not. You know modern stories about AIs becoming self-aware? That's the Unfleshed. They're not just a splat for I, Robot, though. They're Data and Skynet and that AI: Artifical Intelligence movie from several years ago. The Unfleshed are not, and never have been, human. A few of them may have been deliberate attempts to build androids, but many of them are not. There was no ritual involved. There was no mad scientist crying that it's alive. They're machine intelligences that got smart. And then woke up in human-like bodies with Pyros boiling in their hearts. The very existence of the Unfleshed poses a question: what the gently caress is going on with them, and what does it mean for the Prometheans in general? They break rules existing Prometheans take for granted, and raise all sorts of questions about Pyros and the quest for humanity.
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Jul 22, 2014 16:50
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Cythereal posted:Elaborating on Promethean a bit more, the basic lineages of Prometheans are grounded in antiquity and myth: Galateans trace their roots to classical Greek myth, Osirans to Egyptian mythology, Tammuz to Jewish folklore, Ulgans to a variety of shamanistic and animistic lores (if a Promethean ever shows up in a Werewolf game, it's probably one of these guys), and Frankensteins stand out as by far the most modern. All classical and Victorian attempts at creating life. And the thing is, apart from their origins, Unfleshed are almost identical to organic Created. Their New Dawn is the exact same quest, if they successfully complete it they transmute themselves into normal, carbon-based humans. Part of their milestones always involves realizing machines are an extension of Humanity, as humans built them. Which makes things even more confusing.
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Jul 22, 2014 17:00
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UrbicaMortis posted:They're mentioned but not in great detail. Demon just says, 'hey, there are similarities between angels and quashmallim but they're definitely not the same thing. What are they? Who knows?' And this kind of stuff is one of the big differences nWoD have when compared to oWoD. I'm pretty sure that there won't be an official material that authoritatively explains what's the deal with qashmallim. Some things are deliberately left as unknown with maybe some small suggestions here and there. This leaves things to story-teller's discretion and it's better for the players. It means there are some real mysteries for you to explore and you can't just learn about them by reading some awful book that tells you vicissitude is a parasite that came from whatever or some such tripe.
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Jul 22, 2014 17:08
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citybeatnik posted:There's actually a semi-interesting reason why, aside from trying to distance the new game from the old and its use of "modern" terms. I'll hunt down the article talking about it later but it involves sumerian words and the great vowel shift. All I can say is that writing Sumerian without cuneiform or the proper notation is like writing Chinese without its symbols or proper tone markers. Way too many words come out as homographs and you're asking to be misinterpreted. In this case, it's particularly unfortunate because in Sumerian u2r means the privates. So uratha sounds very like you're trying to say 'cockfight' or perhaps 'dick measuring contest'.
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Jul 22, 2014 17:50
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fspades posted:And this kind of stuff is one of the big differences nWoD have when compared to oWoD. I'm pretty sure that there won't be an official material that authoritatively explains what's the deal with qashmallim. Some things are deliberately left as unknown with maybe some small suggestions here and there. This leaves things to story-teller's discretion and it's better for the players. It means there are some real mysteries for you to explore and you can't just learn about them by reading some awful book that tells you vicissitude is a parasite that came from whatever or some such tripe. NWoD was never interested in being a grand meta-narrative like OWoD. NWoD is a toolbox, not a narrative. Some people don't like that approach. Me, I love it. Hunter best exemplifies the "toolbox" approach. It gives you a million and one different ways you COULD play Hunters, and any or none of them could be valid and true in your NWoD. Don't like a Conspiracy? Don't use it. Do you want to do Conspiracy level Hunters (big, clandestine organizations that operate worldwide)? Do you want to do street level Hunter (local bumblefucks in over their head)? Do you want to be a rich victorian gentleman's club (werewolf head over the fireplace in the lounge old bean eh wot) that gets it's jollies hunting the supernatural? NWoD Hunter has support for all these variations and doesn't give a gently caress what you do with them.
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Jul 22, 2014 19:01
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Sleep of Bronze posted:So uratha sounds very like you're trying to say 'cockfight' or perhaps 'dick measuring contest'. That does describe a lot of werewolf interactions.
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Jul 22, 2014 19:06
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Sleep of Bronze posted:All I can say is that writing Sumerian without cuneiform or the proper notation is like writing Chinese without its symbols or proper tone markers. Way too many words come out as homographs and you're asking to be misinterpreted. In this case, it's particularly unfortunate because in Sumerian u2r means the privates. So uratha sounds very like you're trying to say 'cockfight' or perhaps 'dick measuring contest'. A good dick joke is never a bad thing. ethan skemp posted:The root of most First Tongue stuff is Sumerian, then run back through Grimm's Law. Step Three is where it gets really complicated, though, as many — and I mean many — a word is not at all literally the un-Grimmed Sumerian root. Messing around in WTF: Blasphemies I had to come up with some weird poetic language — like "neighbor-desire" for Envy. Many of the words that you see in the core were assembled by the guy who first put this thing together (James Kiley) and then many more were done by Carl Bowen while I was working on other stuff. So I can't quote the exact etymology of some words. Hieing all the way back to that traffic light spirit, the Little Road Tyrant — yeah, its First Tongue name was derived from the Sumerian "red-yellow-green."
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Jul 22, 2014 19:07
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EagerSleeper posted:I've heard that White Wolf put out a game about mummies. Does anyone remember what the plot behind that was? From my wall of words last page: Tehan posted: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. Ma'at's the most benevolent and least ambiguous superpower you can find in the entire drat setting, which filters down to his Mummies making them the closest thing to good guys. Even so, they're rather fractured and argue about who should be in charge and whether there's actually any hope of victory over the forces of evil, and a lot of them are disillusioned after a bajillion years of fighting the good fight. Then there's mummies created by other sources, including a new and improved Spell of Life distributed by Osiris after the Sixth Maelstrom woke him up, Incan mummies created by Incan ancestor-spirits, and ones made by the Chinese Eight Immmortals. While there's a lot of internal tension between the old guard and these newcomers, they're still united in purpose and if you tilt your head and squint you can see Ma'at as Zordon, Osiris as Alpha 5 and Apophis as Rita Repulsa.
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Jul 22, 2014 19:14
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Tehan posted:From my wall of words last page: Find me dead people...with attitude?
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Jul 22, 2014 19:17
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Tehan posted:While there's a lot of internal tension between the old guard and these newcomers, they're still united in purpose and if you tilt your head and squint you can see Ma'at as Zordon, Osiris as Alpha 5 and Apophis as Rita Repulsa. ...how? Seriously, explain how because I really want to hear this. Is there a Lord Zed equivalent if you stretch it far enough? Fantastic Alice fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 19:26
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xanthan posted:...how? Seriously, explain how because I really want to hear this. Unlike the Vampires or Mages, they don't have to figure out what to do with their power because they know drat well why they have said power. Unlike the werecritters, there's no arguing about what needs to be done because they can just go ask Ma'at. Their watches play the Go Go Power Rangers tune and they drop whatever they're doing in their real lives (because they can, and do, pass for regular people when they're not off fighting evil) and they go fight the forces of evil. Less angst about ambiguity of purpose, more overdone kung-fu and punching giant evil monsters in the dick. Arguably Set was Lord Zed, but he was killed by a werewolf a couple thousand years ago. The Followers are Set are definitely the henchmen in this parallel. Bane Mummies are Tommy, the Green Ranger. Tehan fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 19:37
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Captain Oblivious posted:NWoD Hunter has support for all these variations and doesn't give a gently caress what you do with them. And it can even be run as a beer and pizza light-hearted action game, which is what my local gaming group did before we switched to Rogue Trader. Our very first session of Hunter boiled down to "The president has been kidnapped by vampires. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?"
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Jul 22, 2014 19:40
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Cythereal posted:And it can even be run as a beer and pizza light-hearted action game, which is what my local gaming group did before we switched to Rogue Trader. Our very first session of Hunter boiled down to "The president has been kidnapped by vampires. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?" Yeah you really can't do that with OWoD Hunter because it's just so overwhelmingly bleak. NWoD Hunter doesn't really give a poo poo what you do 
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Jul 22, 2014 19:50
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