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IMJack posted:Did Wesp remove the big reward for the Hengeyokai quest? The magic katana that will carry you through the endgame if you have any melee skill to speak of? I think he just moved it elsewhere.
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Dec 11, 2014 04:14
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Yeah, the Rokea is a bit of an odd choice, but this game is no stranger to "really rare poo poo just popping up" and I guess they said "why not" for it. See: Nagaraja As for the war: For centuries the kuei-jin were in their part of the world and the kin-jin (cainite vampires) were in theirs. That changed in the last few hundred years, and the kuei-jin geared up for war, especially after Ravnos woke up. They massively invaded the west coast of the US around the turn of the millennium, which all but destroyed the Anarch Free States. The Cam and Sabbat both sat on their hands since it was the anarchs, and this game shows that the Cam has more or less tried to fill the vacuum. The anarchs are licking their wounds, and the Kuei-jin are trying to consolidate and do the same. So this game is during an "unofficial" ceasefire/cold war period (since "official" would imply a treaty or organization). Otherwise, Mels would be gibbed the moment she step foot in Chinatown.
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Dec 11, 2014 04:21
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IMJack posted:Did Wesp remove the big reward for the Hengeyokai quest? The magic katana that will carry you through the endgame if you have any melee skill to speak of? This quest isn't where you got that in the unpatched game. Though it would certainly make more sense to get it there than it dropping of some random nameless Sabbat mook in the hotel
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Dec 11, 2014 05:00
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Actually that reward is, if I remember right, one of the running wesp jokes because it gets moved around every other patch.
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Dec 11, 2014 05:48
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I wonder how much of what WESP does is just to gently caress with people.
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Dec 11, 2014 05:51
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I get how much he puts into this game, like, whole entire sets of first person wavy-hand animations for disciplines, but some of it really disrupts the flow (like aforementioned hand animations stopping me from spamming blood magic.) It wouldn't be a problem if I didn't like half of the stuff in the plus patch and dislike the other half.
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Dec 11, 2014 06:02
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So are dragons a thing in this series, or no? I expect they are given that pretty much everything else is. Also holy poo poo that Rokea.
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Dec 11, 2014 08:00
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Arcade Rabbit posted:So are dragons a thing in this series, or no? I expect they are given that pretty much everything else is. Dragons are a thing. They're a Mage thing, though. You see, long ago, dragons did in fact roam the earth and eat random peasants. Then these wizards who called themselves the Order of Reason were like, "hey, all this magic works if you believe in it hard enough. What happens if we get everyone to believe that dragons don't exist? Also, you know what'd be cool? Letting everyone use magic! We'll call it 'technology' and it'll be awesome." And so they did it, and people embraced their teachings because being able to walk to the store without being eaten by a dragon was awesome, and so was not dying of dysentery if you didn't give enough goats to the shaman to sacrifice. And so dragons and other mythical creatures got kicked off of Earth. They're called Bygones now, and if you summon them to Earth they need to be fueled with Quintessence (magic juice) to survive. Now, things happened and the Order of Reason became the significantly more sinister but far more stylish Technocracy, but the dragons didn't forget their grudge, and were hanging out in outer space because it's a place where human belief doesn't have nearly as strong a hold. So the Void Engineers, who are basically the Technocracy's equivalent of XCOM, have battleships designed to make space empty and lifeless like they say it is, which is helpful when you don't want NASA's astronauts seeing dragons flying around in the vacuum of space by flapping their wings. These warships have gigantic powered blade-arms specifically to kill loving dragons.
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Dec 11, 2014 08:37
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Arcade Rabbit posted:Also holy poo poo that Rokea. Yeah, there's a reason that smart vampires fight a changing breed by waiting until he's in human form and putting a silver plated knife through the back of his neck. A straight slugging match, even two on one is not a fight you would be expected to survive. They are stronger than you, tougher than you, heal faster than you, have much better reach than you and their hands are made of knives that deal aggravated damage. And that's before they start using their powers.
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Dec 11, 2014 09:03
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apostateCourier posted:Given that the only thing the Rokea have to do to fulfill their species' goal is survive, he hosed up here. What was he going to do with the money, anyway? citybeatnik posted:I'd imagine that the Beast Court equivalent of a rokea would be slightly different, in a way that appears to be more mysterious and powerful than their western counterparts, because this is the WoD. PSA: If the wereshark 101 from six months ago is a bit fuzzy, read this post and the one directly after it before you get into the  about to come.The Betweener schism ignored one big ol' elephant in the room: not only were their an entire society of Betweeners in the East, but they had already had generation after generation of human-born weresharks without the sky falling on anyone's heads. But 'Rokea' is a culture and religion as well as a species, so most of them wouldn't even acknowledge the relation. The weresharks of Asia, called Same-Bito, are part of the Beast Courts, which... okay, going to need to do Beast Courts 101 too I guess. Shapeshifter history can always, always, always be boiled down to 'the werewolves hosed everything up and now everything's poo poo forever  '. In the east, that story is 'there were no werewolves so things are kinda okay sometimes  '. The changing breeds of Asia banded together in prehistory to hammer out something dedicated to the protection of Caerns (shapeshifter holy sites) - sorta like the Camarilla except less inherently pyramid-y. They were buddies with the precursors to the Kuei-Jin during prehistory, and when the proto-KJ were in their downward spiral they sparked civil wars in the Beast Courts so they could backstab whoever won and eat their souls and probably their holy sites. Incidentally, the Beast Courts say that Gaia cursed the KJ into their current forms for this betrayal. oWoD really loved it's unreliable narration.It was around or shortly after this era that a weredragon* stumbled across a wereshark splashing around in the shallows on a beach and the former adopted the latter as her student, in what I can only assume is the best retelling of Karate Kid imaginable. Upon finishing his lessons the wereshark went back to all his wereshark buddies and proselytized, leading to a bunch of weresharks renouncing their former religion and culture to swear loyalty to the Beast Court and slotting neatly in as shock troops. With the renouncing of their former culture their prohibition against surface living was gone, and as a result there's been weresharks not only running around on land but also having little wereshark babies with humans for literally thousands of years. The Rokea pretend they haven't noticed because they know the combined might of the Beast Court would wreck the entirety of their poo poo if they tried to start anything. *Yes, weredragon. Any link to MJ12's spacedragons is probably a chicken-and-egg scenario where the cumulative belief in one caused the other to come into being. Technically they're a sub-breed of the werereptiles known as Mokole, but where western Mokole have dinosaur intermediate forms, the eastern Mokole have dragons.
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Dec 11, 2014 10:46
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So the central thing I'm taking away from this thread is that Eastern World of Darkness is the loving poo poo, and the Western half got jipped big time.
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Dec 11, 2014 10:57
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Western oWoD is Gothic-Punk. Eastern oWoD is John Woo.
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Dec 11, 2014 11:11
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Can I or can I not be a demon-hunting luchador in the World of Darkness?
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Dec 11, 2014 11:27
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Dec 11, 2014 11:36
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 Okay I unironically want to play a campaign now.
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Dec 11, 2014 11:46
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MJ12 posted:Dragons are a thing. They're a Mage thing, though. Also, Zmei in the Werewolf setting, see Rage in Russia. The Hammerhead  I love Chinatown in this game.I haven't payed much attention to this thread due to weird workshifts, has there been any  posts about Kuei-Jin? I think it's about time for the weaboo spergfest.
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Dec 11, 2014 12:13
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Angry Lobster posted:I haven't payed much attention to this thread due to weird workshifts, has there been any There were some posts on them after this update but I'd rate them at 500 millispergs at best. There's definitely room for someone who knows them well to take the spotlight for a bit.
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Dec 11, 2014 12:21
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tlarn posted:
Totally doable. The lot (relatively) of Nosferatu participate in Luchadore wrestling in Mexico and, to a lesser extent, South America. Also, I completely forgot that the demon was a Rokea. I guess someone DID remember them 
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Dec 11, 2014 13:02
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Angry Lobster posted:I haven't payed much attention to this thread due to weird workshifts, has there been any Alright, time to chime in on this one now. Kuei-jin are not vampires. Let's get that out of the way so far. They are mortals who have died and risen to fulfill their Karmic duties. Usually this is because of a life full of imbalance. When you hear stories about gangsters being betrayed and coming back to take revenge, or honorable cops in a dishonorable city gunned down only to be reborn, that's Kuei-jin stuff. Of course, they don't come back as they were right away. When a Kuei-jin rises, they're very like zombies. Their bodies are saturated with Yin (energy associated with the underworld) and they are little more than mindless ghouls. Many don't make it past that stage and are put down. Once they regain some of their balance, going from Dharma 0 to 1, they resemble their old living selves again. The Kindred of the East do not have a Beast as the Caineites do. Instead, there's a demon spirit called the P'o that whispers in the back of their minds. It plays a far more active role in tempting and goading the Kuei-jin. It's tempered by the Hun, sort of the superego of the person in question and representing higher rational thought. Various Dharma paths focus on one of several virtues, of which these are two. Dharma is the "Path" that Kuei-jin follow. There are several, each with a different virtue at its core. Howl of the Devil-Tiger is the one that focuses on cultivating P'o, while Dance of the Thrashing Dragon is built around Yang (the Chi aspected to the living world). Dharma also governs how a Kuei-jin can absorb Chi. While vampires gain sustenance from blood alone (and technically ash, but whatever), their Eastern counterparts need Chi. As the mindless ghoul of the chih-meh (Dharma 0), they can only get Chi from eating flesh. Once they scrape themselves up to Dharma 1 they can start to gain it from blood instead. At Dharma 5, they start being able to absorb it from the "breath" of their victims, drawing Chi straight from the being without injury (though it still inflicts health damage as normal). Masters of Dharmic paths at 6+ can simply absorb Chi from the spirit world around them. Chi comes in several flavors. The most common are Yin and Yang, aspected with the dead and living worlds respectively. To this end, Kuei-jin have pools for each rather than a blood pool like vampires do. Each has different abilities they can power, Yin allowing a character to perceive ghosts for a scene by spending a point, Yang letting you perceive the auras of the living. Yang is also the Chi spent for healing wounds, while Yin allows you to resist Fire Soul (their version of Rotschrek). You've also got Demon Chi, which comes from the P'o. There's a lot of nasty tricks you can pull with it, but risk losing yourself to the P'o and falling in your Dharma Path. There's also Black Chi, which is toxic to most Kuei-jin. It comes from spiritually poisonous places. Hiroshima is the most prevalent example. This is a brief overview. Gimme specific questions and I can focus a little better. Also maybe when I've had some breakfast.
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Dec 11, 2014 13:31
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MJ12 posted:*snip* It's like Outlaw Star!
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Dec 11, 2014 14:39
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Consensual Reality and all that, just go far enough.
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Dec 11, 2014 16:30
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GuyUpNorth posted:Consensual Reality and all that, just go far enough. This is a thing to the point where if you believe that you can breathe in space you can, so long as there aren't enough people around to force their will upon your reality.
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Dec 11, 2014 16:33
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apostateCourier posted:This is a thing to the point where if you believe that you can breathe in space you can, so long as there aren't enough people around to force their will upon your reality. It also means that you can have Void Engineer space ships being broadsided by a floating pirate ships.
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Dec 11, 2014 18:04
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apostateCourier posted:This is a thing to the point where if you believe that you can breathe in space you can, so long as there aren't enough people around to force their will upon your reality. One of the big arguments that caused the Sons of Ether to leave the Technocracy was that the Technocrats decided to quash the idea of "celestial phlogiston," which was a discredited theory from the 1700s in the real world. As far as the Technocrats are concerned, outer space is hard vacuum and you need a suit to survive it. As far as the Sons of Ether are concerned, and therefore the Traditions, outer space is phlogiston, which is perfectly survivable. (Tradition mages will still want a ship of some kind, since everyone still agrees that space is really loving big; faster-than-light travel is a Forces 5/Correspondence 5 effect.) It's actually a fairly good example of how magic and belief work in the system. If you throw a Technocrat out an airlock and he/she survives, he/she is not a Technocrat any longer. Their self-preservation reflex kicked in hard enough that it overwrote their previous convictions about how air works.
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Dec 11, 2014 19:00
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gatz posted:I wonder how much of what WESP does is just to gently caress with people. My guess is if you asked him he'd say most of it was to add replay value to people who've played VTMB 3047 times by changing things up a bit. If you asked him after a few beers, it'd probably be "most of it is just loving with people."
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Dec 11, 2014 19:21
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The only Mage game that I ever played in was heavily based around being cool, magical dudes floating around the solar system in spaceships trying to uplift the rest of humanity into an awesome spacefaring future. The Technocracy in that game were the rear end in a top hat Men In Black trying to defund NASA and turn the world into a nest of despair and drudgery. We smoked a lot of pot while playing that campaign, and it was awesome to battle the forces of terminal lameness & evil and be the hippie saviors of humanity.
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Dec 11, 2014 19:25
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Wanderer posted:One of the big arguments that caused the Sons of Ether to leave the Technocracy was that the Technocrats decided to quash the idea of "celestial phlogiston," which was a discredited theory from the 1700s in the real world. As far as the Technocrats are concerned, outer space is hard vacuum and you need a suit to survive it. As far as the Sons of Ether are concerned, and therefore the Traditions, outer space is phlogiston, which is perfectly survivable. Couldn't the Technocrat magic up something to survive hard vacuum without having to switch beliefs? Breathing hard vacuum has got to be as much Paradox-inducing as conjuring a spacesuit: if there are muggles watching you, you're screwed either way.
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Dec 11, 2014 19:36
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Zeroisanumber posted:The only Mage game that I ever played in was heavily based around being cool, magical dudes floating around the solar system in spaceships trying to uplift the rest of humanity into an awesome spacefaring future. The Technocracy in that game were the rear end in a top hat Men In Black trying to defund NASA and turn the world into a nest of despair and drudgery. Pfft. Verbena or Cultist? Omobono posted:Couldn't the Technocrat magic up something to survive hard vacuum without having to switch beliefs? Breathing hard vacuum has got to be as much Paradox-inducing as conjuring a spacesuit: if there are muggles watching you, you're screwed either way. That's just it: there's so little Consensus with deep space that you could just say "I'm Batman, and I can breathe in space" and it works. Paradox is just the enforcer for Consensus; where it has no hold you don't get hit by it. This is also why archmages tended to live in pocket dimensions before the Avatar Storm. OAquinas fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Dec 11, 2014 |
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Dec 11, 2014 19:37
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It also doesn't help that Space = the Umbra, aka the Spirit World.
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Dec 11, 2014 19:48
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Omobono posted:Couldn't the Technocrat magic up something to survive hard vacuum without having to switch beliefs? Breathing hard vacuum has got to be as much Paradox-inducing as conjuring a spacesuit: if there are muggles watching you, you're screwed either way. (Many) Technocrats don't believe they can conjure up a spacesuit, so they can't. If they tried to wedge it into their praxis, it would be vulgar with themselves as the witness. Mage is fun. (now, a pocket-size folding polymer emergency breathing apparatus, well...)
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Dec 11, 2014 19:59
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OAquinas posted:Pfft. Verbena or Cultist? Verbena, and don't hate on fun.
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Dec 11, 2014 20:01
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Hard to hate on Cultists when one of their factions are full-blown viking berserkers and another is "Fight Club meets Eyes Wide Shut meets The Ninth Gate".
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Dec 11, 2014 20:35
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citybeatnik posted:Hard to hate on Cultists when one of their factions are full-blown viking berserkers and another is "Fight Club meets Eyes Wide Shut meets The Ninth Gate". Can some please tell me more about these cultists? Everything I hear about mage makes love it more and this sounds like a pretty interesting chunk of it.
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Dec 11, 2014 21:08
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Omobono posted:Couldn't the Technocrat magic up something to survive hard vacuum without having to switch beliefs? Breathing hard vacuum has got to be as much Paradox-inducing as conjuring a spacesuit: if there are muggles watching you, you're screwed either way. Technocrats straight-up need their magitech to do magic. In fact, that's how they do magic- they make things, and then those things do things that their view of reality says that they should do. So, in this example, it would be reasonable for a technocrat to have an emergency suit relocation beacon, that pulls their space suit through a hole in space-time to fill the space around their person.
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Dec 11, 2014 21:24
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Omobono posted:Couldn't the Technocrat magic up something to survive hard vacuum without having to switch beliefs? Breathing hard vacuum has got to be as much Paradox-inducing as conjuring a spacesuit: if there are muggles watching you, you're screwed either way. It's not really about Paradox, but about belief structures. If you're in space at all, Paradox is not likely to be a going concern. (Mages can have non-mage buddies who don't count as witnesses for magic, which old-fashioned Tradition mages call "consors," much in the spirit of how Dr. Strange has his buddy Wong. If there's a normal human watching you get thrown out an airlock, he's probably a consor. There's no real ritual for creating one; you just have to expose a normal human to enough weird poo poo that they can readily accept that magic is real. A dude who is standing on a spaceship in 1997 AD is probably consor enough for rules purposes.) apostateCourier posted:Technocrats straight-up need their magitech to do magic. In fact, that's how they do magic- they make things, and then those things do things that their view of reality says that they should do. Yeah. The big weakness of Technocratic "magic" is their utter dependence on devices. Tradition mages are flexible enough that they can eventually cast spells with will alone, or make something up on the fly with what they have. If you threw a Tradition mage into a room that was full of actual hard vacuum, they've got thirty seconds to come up with something. Thus, if you throw an unsuited Technocrat out an airlock and the Technocrat does not specifically have a device that will allow him/her to survive vacuum, that Technocrat is hosed. If they planned ahead and have a teleport shunt or suit-in-a-can or something, they're fine; if they're unprepared, they're going to die unless they break through their own beliefs.
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Dec 11, 2014 21:38
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citybeatnik posted:"Fight Club meets Eyes Wide Shut meets The Ninth Gate". That's definitely a movie I would watch...
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Dec 11, 2014 21:44
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Cult of Ecstacy, where getting baked is totally valid paradigm. So is sex, drugs and probably rock 'n roll.
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Dec 11, 2014 21:55
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xanthan posted:Can some please tell me more about these cultists? Everything I hear about mage makes love it more and this sounds like a pretty interesting chunk of it. There are some decent write-ups about them earlier in the thread and they have one of the better Tradition books in the 3rd edition "Revised" line. That book also introduces a lot of Tradition-specific terminology that mostly involves India and Buddhism, which I have yet to successfully absorb despite how much I know about the rest of the line. Basically, anyone who seriously pursues altered states of mind as a method of working magic could qualify as a Cultist. The stereotype is that they're all drug-addled, omnisexual hippies who dress like the forgotten love child of Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, but you can play a perfectly workable Cultist who's really into adrenaline, music, dancing, or self-inflicted pain (not necessarily BDSM, but also stuff like body modification or the Sun Dance). The idea is to break through the barriers of perception, and one way is as good as another. They're responsible for a good many designer drugs, record stores, head shops, and music festivals, but one of the big points of their philosophy is that if you're going to Awaken, they're going to let you do it in your own time. Not everything is for everyone. One of the big factions introduced in their Tradition book is the Children's Crusade, which concerns itself with stamping out child pornography and slavery, and which is apparently one of the few Tradition organizations that the Technocracy will happily ignore.
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Dec 11, 2014 21:57
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apostateCourier posted:Technocrats straight-up need their magitech to do magic. In fact, that's how they do magic- they make things, and then those things do things that their view of reality says that they should do. It also puts a bit of a hard-lock on what they can accomplish with their devices in places where consensual reality reigns supreme. A Technocrat could use a laser rifle powered by magic out in the atmosphere, but bring it to Earth and consensual reality says that it doesn't work. Technocrats put this down to "environmental conditions" that affect the "delicate machinery" of their magic devices, but it's just ordinary people not believing in it. That's a big part of the reason that Technocrats push the boundaries of human technology as quickly as they safely can, it gives them more power.
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Dec 11, 2014 22:01
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Wanderer posted:
That's a really hardcore way for the Traditions to get new recruits. Although I guess it's more likely t create an enemy who has nothing t0 lose.
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Dec 11, 2014 22:02
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