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Kavak posted:That's it. That's what these motherfuckers are. They're the True Fae that got "left behind" on Earth. Their myths and heroes are storycrafting or whatever it's called, it all makes sense. This is the Changeling Translation Guide! 
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Jun 7, 2015 03:04
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Honestly, yeah, the pure would group up with the Beasts. What better way to weaken a rival pack of Uratha than to have a beast go and dump nightmares on all their friends and family and leave the local spirits a nice big fear-meal.
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Jun 7, 2015 03:11
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Boogaleeboo posted:Delenda est bestia. Or something, I think it's supposed to be dative. Latin has too many loving declensions. I think it's "Bestiae delenda est" -- lit. "Destruction must occur to Beast." I could at least tolerate Beast if the Beast-Hero relationship was more like the Vampire-Hunter relationship -- i.e. "One of these people needs to drink blood to survive and the other doesn't, but in an individual case, the hunter may be the fucker compared to an individual vampire who subsists on animal blood" as opposed to "One of these people needs to abuse others to survive and the other doesn't, but the latter is never, ever sympathetic and is always in the wrong when they attack beasts." I could even sort of tolerate the latter, if the book acknowledged that Heroes are (sort of, at least it's implied) a type of Beast that Hungers for all the things Beasts hunger for, except with Beasts as the only viable targets. But the spiel is always that Heroes are pathetic and ignorant compared to the power and majesty of the Dark Mother's Children. It's exhausting to read.
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Jun 7, 2015 03:11
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Ae would be the dative, yeah. I think I'm just going to accept that Beasts make a wonderful thing to let people kill when they want to feel better about themselves, or a note on the oddness of the other realms interacting with ours. Here's what happens when a destructive dream form takes up residence on the mortal plane! On that level at least, they excel wildly.
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Jun 7, 2015 03:16
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tatankatonk posted:Just shovel more garbage into my brain Also I can't read Namtaru and see anything besides Hamtaro, and tell me you wouldn't play a game about evil hamsters.
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Jun 7, 2015 03:24
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If they ever do a Horror Recognition Guide 2, there better be a story where the narrator gets tricked onto a boat, kills the driver while he's muttering about the sweet fruits of the abyss, and when they get back to shore there's a huge crowd of vampires, werewolves, and changelings there waiting to high five them for getting rid of the guy that makes the rest of them look bad.
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Jun 7, 2015 03:25
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:If they ever do a Horror Recognition Guide 2, there better be a story where the narrator gets tricked onto a boat, kills the driver while he's muttering about the sweet fruits of the abyss, and when they get back to shore there's a huge crowd of vampires, werewolves, and changelings there waiting to high five them for getting rid of the guy that makes the rest of them look bad. "And then everyone started clapping." 
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Jun 7, 2015 03:26
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Luminous Obscurity posted:"And then everyone started clapping."
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Jun 7, 2015 03:30
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:If they ever do a Horror Recognition Guide 2, there better be a story where the narrator gets tricked onto a boat, kills the driver while he's muttering about the sweet fruits of the abyss, and when they get back to shore there's a huge crowd of vampires, werewolves, and changelings there waiting to high five them for getting rid of the guy that makes the rest of them look bad. Hahaha
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Jun 7, 2015 03:36
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What if Beast: the Primordial is actually a Promethean created out of all the dumb preachy things that were cut from Werewolf: the Apocalypse to create Werewolf: the Forsaken? What if all our comments are the manifestations of Beast's Disquiet? Makes you think.
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Jun 7, 2015 04:18
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What I find most interesting about Beast is how, in attempting to do Barker, they ended up repeatedly hitting the banality of evil dead in the face. I mean, Stephen King would be embarrassed to write about an evil taxi. What I find most off-putting is, with the Beast-as-queer-folk symbolism, it really seems like they're suggesting that queerness is something that can only exist when performed, and dies if it isn't regularly performed (and while I loathe Andrew Sullivan as much as anybody, it seems a bit gross to call him a fake gay), but the process of performing itself creates unending opposition. Pretty loving bleak, but thankfully I can cauterize this subtext out if I ever get begged to play a game.
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Jun 7, 2015 04:24
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Effectronica posted:
Let's not say things we know aren't true.
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Jun 7, 2015 04:32
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I think Stephen King would write about an evil taxi, but do it competently. From a Buick 8 wasn't scary, but it was readable, and I found the central conceit one that inspired curiosity rather than fear. Beast on the other hand, inspires nothing but exasperation on a good day.
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Jun 7, 2015 04:35
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Daeren posted:Let's not say things we know aren't true. CommissarMega posted:I think Stephen King would write about an evil taxi, but do it competently. From a Buick 8 wasn't scary, but it was readable, and I found the central conceit one that inspired curiosity rather than fear. Let's meet in the middle and say he wouldn't write Goth Creeper Taxicab Service.
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Jun 7, 2015 04:37
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Daeren posted:Not only that, you're mechanically forced to like them if you're supernatural. The sad fact is, we're (that is, the people posting in this thread) kind of the minority of the White Wolf/Onyx Path userbase. It doesn't actually surprise me that it got funded. Although i don't know which of those two reasons is more prevalent.
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Jun 7, 2015 04:39
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Effectronica posted:Let's meet in the middle and say he wouldn't write Goth Creeper Taxicab Service. He would, however, write a Goth Creeper Taxicab Ran Me Over short story, were this 15 years ago and he was still traumatized and high as balls on painkillers 24/7.
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Jun 7, 2015 04:39
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Obligatum VII posted:The sad fact is, we're (that is, the people posting in this thread) kind of the minority of the White Wolf/Onyx Path userbase. It doesn't actually surprise me that it got funded. Although i don't know which of those two reasons is more prevalent. I'm pretty sure it got funded because of brand loyalty, and the majority of people did so without reading the backer pdf. There are also probably a bunch of people who would still continue to back it even after reading the pdf and being horrified, because they want to support Onyx Path as a company. Let's not make the Princess: the Hopeful fanbase any more important than they already are.
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Jun 7, 2015 04:43
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Daeren posted:He would, however, write a Goth Creeper Taxicab Ran Me Over short story, were this 15 years ago and he was still traumatized and high as balls on painkillers 24/7. Was that the period when he wrote the short story where a kid killed a werewolf with his silver plated wheelchair or something?
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Jun 7, 2015 04:45
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Kurieg posted:Was that the period when he wrote the short story where a kid killed a werewolf with his silver plated wheelchair or something? I don't recall that one offhand, but most of what I remember about his writing after the car accident was Dreamcatcher, in retrospect, was very clearly written by someone on heavy-grade painkillers. Shitweasels, dude.
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Jun 7, 2015 04:49
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Guys, Stephen King did write Christine. I'd totally read a sequel about an evil taxi. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O08w8CegEeg
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Jun 7, 2015 04:52
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Kurieg posted:Was that the period when he wrote the short story where a kid killed a werewolf with his silver plated wheelchair or something? I think 1408 may have been written under painkillers.
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Jun 7, 2015 04:58
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SunAndSpring posted:I don't even understand why they tried to say Beasts were stand-ins for outsiders and the LGBTs and all that. Why would any of them want to have unrepentant monsters represent them? You figure something like Demon or Changeling or Promethean would suit them better, what with the themes of rebellion, escaping abuse, and finding peace with yourself that those lines have, plus the fact that you can play as a good guy in those lines instead of an abusive jerk. Well, MalcolmSheppard was right that there's a long tradition of LGBT people using monsters and monstrosity to write about themselves. That's why when I did that kind of reading I focused on the relationships Beasts had with the rest of the setting rather than the specifics of their interactions; when you write a vampire story where vampires are understood to be lesbians/gays, it's also understood that you're not saying gay people literally drink the blood of others for sustenance, but that gay relationships are at once enticing, shameful, and potentially physically harmful to people living in a homophobic society. It returns power to sexual minorities while acknowledging the conditions in which they live. That's why presentation, and knowing what your story is about, is so important. It's not wrong to write vampires as gays, but if you're also depicting your vampires as secret cabals of manipulators subverting political systems against the interests of the people they govern, you have to broaden the character of your vampires and make the analogy less direct or you leave yourself open to some fairly unpleasant readings. That's why Anne Rice's vampires don't run boardrooms, and why WoD vampires aren't as closely mapped to gays and lesbians as they are in other stories. Professor Susan Stryker of the University of Arizona has a very good monologue about monstrosity and transgender people which I'll quote bits from here (warning, the full text is some strong-rear end reading): quote:The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster's as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist. (emphasis mine) What Stryker understands and Beast doesn't is that Frankenstein's monster killed the doctor's loved ones out of a real and sympathetic rage against its abject conditions and its creator. Shelley spends a good fourth of the book giving the monster the time and space it needs to explain itself. Interview with the Vampire is *about* the internal life of a vampire. Beasts, on the other hand, just want power over others and don't particularly care how they get it or what they do with it once they have it. They're a thin power fantasy. To be clear, this can be just fine! There's a place for power fantasies, especially among the young. If Beast was a weird fansplat written by some queer teen and shared among friends, I wouldn't say word one against it in public. I might laugh at how silly it is in private, but teens gonna teen and you've gotta let them in order for them to grow up big and strong. As the work of an outcast child, some of Beast makes sense and is excusable- the very obvious abuse reading and Heroes (here standins for personal tormentors) can be politely ignored because the author wouldn't be in a position to imagine themselves, even in fantasy life, as anything other than the victimized. This paragraph, for instance, is Kid Logic: quote:Ultimately, Beasts recognize that the Hero cycle is as much a part of their nature as their Lair and their Soul. Humanity fears Beasts — that’s the intrinsic truth of what they are — and what humanity fears, it invariably attempts to destroy. Beasts quickly learn that they can’t become angry that people have that reaction; it’s reasonable. At the same time, though, the Children know that they have a right to exist. The world is a terrifying place, and the monsters in the dark are there for a reason. The dominant narrative may be “Hero arises, kills the monster,” but the Begotten see past that and know that it doesn’t have to be that way. Heroes, on the other hand, never question their own heroism — and that is why Beasts hate them. It just makes sense that you'd be bullied for your sweet-rear end cape and your assured resemblance to Magus from Chrono Trigger due to extreme jealousy, but do NOT push me in a puddle again BRAD, my mom makes me clean this myself! Jo the Mansplainerdestroyer who is also secretly a hydra or whatever is straight up a Tumblr "monstersona", a reaction from someone with bad things in their real life. You can, and in my opinion should, forgive this kind of thing from a young amateur writer creating a coping mechanism to share among like-minded friends, but Matt McFarland is a grown man and professional author writing material for sale to the general public. That, of course, is where the cracks begin to show. What queer person imagines themselves in their secret heart to be a horrible assistant principal? Or an overly-scrupulous health inspector? Do they read Matilda and sympathize with Headmistress Trunchbull? Beasts don't reclaim power, they exist in it as their natural right, and they employ it in ways that can only be described as petty. Things that would be sympathetic power fantasies in the specific become cruel parody when written generally - Jo is a straight up antifeminist trope, the trapdoor spider who goads men so that she can unjustifiably destroy them. Beasts are feminists and gay people written from the perspective of their enemies, as tinpot dictators in tiny fiefdoms who exult in crushing the helpless and adopting a mien of aggrieved innocence when challenged.
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Jun 7, 2015 04:59
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Kurieg posted:Was that the period when he wrote the short story where a kid killed a werewolf with his silver plated wheelchair or something? You're thinking of Silver Bullet, and it was like a wheelchair-motorcycle combo, and that was written in the late 70s/early 80s, if the concept didn't tip you off. There was a movie. It had Gary Busey and Corey Haim in it. They had a weird scene or two. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM2jVL-McrY (unfortunately this is the only version of the scene I could find in a cursory search of youtube) Crion fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Jun 7, 2015 |
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Jun 7, 2015 05:02
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The central issue with Beast seems to be that nobody really figured out what all the ideas were adding up to at any point up until now. Because queer-as-monster, and specifically queer-as-beast is something with a nice pedigree. Monsters as being an embodiment of fear is something with a nice pedigree. Looking at things from the opposite perspective is something with a nice pedigree. Put them together, and you have an abomination, with the fairly juvenile writing merely being a joke that softens the fairly grotesque nature of the thing.
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Jun 7, 2015 05:07
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Dammit Who? posted:Jo is a straight up antifeminist trope, the trapdoor spider who goads men so that she can unjustifiably destroy them. Beasts are feminists and gay people written from the perspective of their enemies, as tinpot dictators in tiny fiefdoms who exult in crushing the helpless and adopting a mien of aggrieved innocence when challenged. The worst part of this is that their detractors are played straight and legitimized by the text. That guy on tumblr who talks about how people are out to get him. He's right, and he has super powers. And he was injured by the monsters not because of any particular failing of his, but merely by his proximity.
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Jun 7, 2015 05:12
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Obligatum VII posted:The sad fact is, we're (that is, the people posting in this thread) kind of the minority of the White Wolf/Onyx Path userbase. It doesn't actually surprise me that it got funded. Although i don't know which of those two reasons is more prevalent. I am legitimately stunned every time I go to the official oWoD forums. Some of the opinions are just loving bizarre and can't be supported by any reading of the source texts, the subtext, or the genre. That's without getting into specific concerns (one I see constantly is this idea that the Setites, Assamites and Baali are all completely interchangeable and redundant), the constant substitution of people's fanon in discussions about 'canon' stuff (e.g., discussion of the role of justicars in the Camarilla as an example. Someone will come in and say that in his game, Justicars are actually the servants of the Inconnu, the Camarilla doesn't exist, etc, and not see it as a derail) and the enormous amount of love for 1E and 2E. Now, I love the oWoD substantially (and substantively) more than the next man. I even love quite a lot of the cheesy nonsense of 1E and 2E, but to consider them superior story-wise or mechanically to Revised is loving madness. But it seems to be a large part of the groupthink over there that 2E was the peak of the oWoD, and its things like that that gives me huge concerns about C20 and even the way Beast has been handled. The vocal fanbase over there are really weird (they, of course, certainly think the same about us!)
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Jun 7, 2015 05:18
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Loomer posted:
Say what you want about the mechanics, but I think they handled the metaplot/setting changes between editions pretty much perfectly in Mage 20th, and if they take their cues from that, I hope the other 20th edition lines will be nice.
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Jun 7, 2015 05:25
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Yeah, M20 was a pretty solid execution of the change, I have to admit. I disagree with some of the choices made but having the options as the devs see them was interesting. My concern is that they won't take the best from M20 for C20, and it's mostly to do with the nature of that particular game and with Blackhat's recent work on Beast. That and I love the idea of CtD and have always been wretchedly disappointed in the execution.
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Jun 7, 2015 05:30
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Loomer posted:I am legitimately stunned every time I go to the official oWoD forums. Some of the opinions are just loving bizarre and can't be supported by any reading of the source texts, the subtext, or the genre. That's without getting into specific concerns (one I see constantly is this idea that the Setites, Assamites and Baali are all completely interchangeable and redundant), the constant substitution of people's fanon in discussions about 'canon' stuff (e.g., discussion of the role of justicars in the Camarilla as an example. Someone will come in and say that in his game, Justicars are actually the servants of the Inconnu, the Camarilla doesn't exist, etc, and not see it as a derail) and the enormous amount of love for 1E and 2E. That's a common problem with the White Wolf Forums, people absolutely insist that their headcanon is correct, and normally get offended when you point out they're wrong. There was this one guy I remember who had this ridiculously complex setup where there was no magic, mages didn't exist, and everything that vampires and werewolves could do could otherwise be explained "Scientifically". (he also thought that the Baali were the best thing since sliced bread since it let him freak out rape and abuse survivors, funny that) Loomer posted:Yeah, M20 was a pretty solid execution of the change, I have to admit. I disagree with some of the choices made but having the options as the devs see them was interesting. My concern is that they won't take the best from M20 for C20, and it's mostly to do with the nature of that particular game and with Blackhat's recent work on Beast. That and I love the idea of CtD and have always been wretchedly disappointed in the execution. Yeah, Changeling strikes me as one of those games that sounds like it should be about one thing, but every single play experience I've heard has been about something COMPLETELY different, usually something grognardy/terrible.
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Jun 7, 2015 05:37
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Loomer posted:(one I see constantly is this idea that the Setites, Assamites and Baali are all completely interchangeable and redundant) What? How? That's amazing.
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Jun 7, 2015 05:40
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Kurieg posted:That's a common problem with the White Wolf Forums, people absolutely insist that their headcanon is correct, and normally get offended when you point out they're wrong. There was this one guy I remember who had this ridiculously complex setup where there was no magic, mages didn't exist, and everything that vampires and werewolves could do could otherwise be explained "Scientifically". (he also thought that the Baali were the best thing since sliced bread since it let him freak out rape and abuse survivors, funny that) How? 
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Jun 7, 2015 05:45
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tatankatonk posted:Cool. Finally. Retributive justice is ultimately harmful and less useful than restorative justice, but go ahead and beat up some rear end in a top hat murderers or rapists or whatever. Okay? Fine. This is the one that really colors my thoughts that Beasts are lying to themselves about how Feeding works. How does Ahmed punish anyone? They spread a rumor that there's abandoned treasure at the bottom of the lake, then they kill people who weren't doing anything evil, illegal, or even unethical. It's just an excuse to drown people and claim it was "feeding their hunger" after the fact. It inclines me to think that, like, Jo isn't Feeding on out-arguing men, it's just the prologue to get them to throw the first punch so that she can Beast out on them. She's an antifeminist trope because she's only wearing the guise of feminism over a primal desire to injure someone.
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Jun 7, 2015 05:47
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Dammit Who? posted:That, of course, is where the cracks begin to show. What queer person imagines themselves in their secret heart to be a horrible assistant principal? Or an overly-scrupulous health inspector? Do they read Matilda and sympathize with Headmistress Trunchbull? Beasts don't reclaim power, they exist in it as their natural right, and they employ it in ways that can only be described as petty. Things that would be sympathetic power fantasies in the specific become cruel parody when written generally - Jo is a straight up antifeminist trope, the trapdoor spider who goads men so that she can unjustifiably destroy them. Beasts are feminists and gay people written from the perspective of their enemies, as tinpot dictators in tiny fiefdoms who exult in crushing the helpless and adopting a mien of aggrieved innocence when challenged. This is a great post. I will say, though, that I don't have a problem with the Beasts' queerness being powerful. While Jo is terribly written, there is something to be said about using queer performance as a transformative tool. I think the problem is better stated as that Beasts exist far too comfortably in institutions, when, if the queer performance metaphor is fully fleshed out, they should be threatening those institutions with their every move. This ties into Ferrinus' objection, since Beasts are allowed to feed in consequence free ways, destroying any drama feeding might bring. There are mechanics that make Beasts truly threatening to others, but it doesn't work at all with the fluff, which Crion got into before. How does a starving Beast that gives nightmares to everyone near it become a high ranking health inspector? How do they ascend to an administrative position in a school? Trunchbull only works in Matilda because she doesn't represent anything other than the cruelty of the institution, but Beasts can't represent institutions if they're set up as the Other! It's then that they become the antifeminist trope, feminists and gay people who really do use institutions to humiliate their opponents. This comfort extends even to the allegorical fantasy elements. The Beasts are in charge of every single otherworld that has been presented in every other line. They're above the institutional problems of these otherworlds, and can even inflict those problems on other people with their Lairs. A Beast's power is so strong that there is nowhere that he feels uncomfortable or alien, which is crazy if we want to say that Beasts represent a marginalized group. It could be that this is a super-progressive "post-queer" work, which presents a world in which gay people and women are fully accepted into the structures of power. That reading is ultimately a hopeful one, since Beasts can exist and find fulfillment. The book constantly tries to sell us this image of the happy, satisfied Beast. Of course, that reading is problematized by the fact that, despite the authors' objections, the book is incredibly bleak. Nothing is permanent, safety can be threatened without warning or recourse, and standing up to that threat will surely drive someone insane. The book goes as far as to mock PTSD triggers, which completely destroys any idea that this represents a leftist utopia. The reason this problem exists is, again, because the book is deeply incoherent and inconsistent. Read on a paragraph to paragraph basis, I simply can't imagine how this was written, since a single paragraph can negate the very paragraph that came before it. It's schizophrenic. edit: Swagger Dagger posted:Say what you want about the mechanics, but I think they handled the metaplot/setting changes between editions pretty much perfectly in Mage 20th, and if they take their cues from that, I hope the other 20th edition lines will be nice. I love the new Tradition names and philosophies! It was exactly what I was hoping for with the reboot. Not having them as the default presentation, however, really hurt them. They could have used a lot more space to be fleshed out, and having them written up as full splats would sell their legitimacy. It was a huge missed opportunity, all because Brucato was afraid of upsetting the old fans. I am glad that they appeared in the book though, and I hope there's more about them in the Book of Secrets. pospysyl fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Jun 7, 2015 |
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Jun 7, 2015 05:48
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Of the top of my head (since those threads are lost to the mists of time) Werewolves and Vampires were "mutants', which he used to explain away all of their physical abilities, including werewolves being able to breed with wolves. Werewolves gained mass by sucking in carbon dioxide from their environment and solidifying it. Werewolf magic abilities were actually them exuding halucinogenic pheromones to make people *think* they did things leading to his hilarious defense of "WEREWOLVES DO NOT FART THE UMBRA! IT'S HALUCINOGENS!" Also probably the best thing ever was his explanation for Dominate. Vampires firing neurons out of specialized neuron-guns in their forehead, that went into peoples brains and took them over from the inside. We spent about 2 months trying to explain to him all the various ways in which that wouldn't work before he got banned for suggesting that we were all "pussies" for not wanting to roleplay out raping small children for shits and giggles in his Baali game.
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Jun 7, 2015 05:56
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I like the concept of all these supernatural powers having scientific explanations, but neuron guns are another thing entirely It's like trying to explain planetary formation using aether and miasma or something.
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Jun 7, 2015 06:18
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Mormon Star Wars posted:What? How? That's amazing. Well, see, they all worship False Gods and are from somewhere in the middle east and therefore they are one and the same. The most compelling argument I saw was for swapping the bloodline-clan status of the Baali and the Setites to enhance the judeo-christian element of the setting, which I could maybe get behind if it was done really well. But as it stands, the main thrust really is that they all sit there in the middle east not being 'normal' vampires in the sense of the Camarilla, Giovanni or Sabbat clans. And since they're all 'evil', that means they're all interchangeable. Now, nevermind that the 'evil' status of the Setites is very much up in the air because of the strong gnostic underpinnings of that Clan (leave alone that they aren't that much worse than any other clan, really - they're just more open about it), the Assamites are only 'evil' in these interpretations because they like to diablerize people (...aaaand let's ignore that a big part of that is down to the Baali in the first place...) and that all three factions serve very different masters, goals, and use different methodologies. It boils down to 'brown people who think differently are all the same', which is exactly what the Camarilla in its role as Colonialism Metaphor thinks and which a lot of words went into subverting as a result. I've always liked myself that those three groups had their own hugely complex, violent struggle going on night after night throughout the Mid-East and Northern Africa, with the added thorn of 'foreign' influence dating back very bloody far as well. It was one of the more effective pieces of VtM's political subtext as well once they hit revised, this idea that these monolithic blocs of 'Other' out in the Mid-East or Africa were in fact very complex societies of their own, both internally and externally to their clans. It's post-colonialism 101, but in fairness, it works precisely because every portrayal in setting up until that point had been more or less colonialist in nature. A lot of that was attempts to unfuck the genuinely bizarre portrayal of some of the 'lesser' clans in 1E and 2E (we all remember, I trust, the days when Assamites were essentially all male and all muslim because Orientalism) but it created one of the most interesting parts of the setting. But let's just drop all that because 'heavy metal demon worship/desperate attempt to subdue ancient evils via supplication' = 'spreader of enlightenment through suffering' = 'legalistic and honour-bound judges'. They can't see that those things are actually distinct. They literally just see 'bad guys' who can be interchanged. CommissarMega posted:I like the concept of all these supernatural powers having scientific explanations, but neuron guns are another thing entirely Aaaand that's going in the Sons of Ether playbook.
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Jun 7, 2015 06:24
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Precambrian posted:FFFFUCK OFFF This is the one that really colors my thoughts that Beasts are lying to themselves about how Feeding works. How does Ahmed punish anyone? They spread a rumor that there's abandoned treasure at the bottom of the lake, then they kill people who weren't doing anything evil, illegal, or even unethical. It's just an excuse to drown people and claim it was "feeding their hunger" after the fact. It inclines me to think that, like, Jo isn't Feeding on out-arguing men, it's just the prologue to get them to throw the first punch so that she can Beast out on them. She's an antifeminist trope because she's only wearing the guise of feminism over a primal desire to injure someone. [/quote] Maybe all that treasure belongs in a museum, and that's what he's punishing? I think you can ditch all the feeding types except Punishers, forget the Dark Mother and links to other supernatural types and turn this in the WoD Superhero game in the vein of Unbreakable. Heroes are actually villains who cause mayhem looking to create a Hero to rail against. Now the Beasts are compelled to go and "fight crime" to build their power, otherwise the let the Villain destory lives and property and ultimately kill them. Man, I was so interested in Beast when it was announced but reading through the pdf and the comments in this thread has made me wonder if it's even worth salvaging.
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Jun 7, 2015 07:02
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tatankatonk posted:Haha, gently caress off. You can't write the Tyrant introduction and then try and pull the Adamantine Arrow Lawyer out of your rear end. This is infinitely entertaining and you should possibly do the entire book like this. Also, I feel like I have to play an AA lawyer the next time I play a nMage game. There is a metaphysical weight to this poo poo now.
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Jun 7, 2015 07:07
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Precambrian posted:This is the one that really colors my thoughts that Beasts are lying to themselves about how Feeding works. How does Ahmed punish anyone? They spread a rumor that there's abandoned treasure at the bottom of the lake, then they kill people who weren't doing anything evil, illegal, or even unethical. It's just an excuse to drown people and claim it was "feeding their hunger" after the fact. If I were to hazard a guess, it would probably be more on the lines of punishing for their greed, their vices, or some poo poo like that. idk
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Jun 7, 2015 07:18
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Loomer posted:But as it stands, the main thrust really is that they all sit there in the middle east not being 'normal' vampires in the sense of the Camarilla, Giovanni or Sabbat clans. And since they're all 'evil', that means they're all interchangeable. I don't even know how to respond to that. By revised, the Assamites and Setites (and their spinoffs) had become some of the most interesting parts of the setting and were loaded with dramatic hooks, but they were totally different hooks. I'd be scared to see what they thought of the Ahl-i-Batin and Taftani, in that case.
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Jun 7, 2015 07:20
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