quote:

“The gently caress are you looking at, dipshit?” Kyle snarled, standing up and walking up with his hands out in a macho pose he’d probably seen in a dozen tough guy movies.
Ben stopped up short, hands hooked around his backpack straps, trying to hide the smile on his face, maybe even put on a little fear. That’s what they’d want to see, after all, and that just made what was coming even sweeter. There were three of them, Kyle and two of his admirers. You could usually catch them smoking at the edge of the parking lot before school. He’d heard they liked to come out here and sneak some booze, maybe blaze a little bit, but the thin boy with frightened eyes behind them told a different story.
Good. He’d been hoping for something worse than a little weed.
“Hey guys, I just wanted to let you know — you know what? gently caress it.” Ben normally drew out a feeding, savoring the indulgence, but the monster was growling loudly and he couldn’t be bothered. Instead he drew on the cold depths within and looked at the two boys behind Kyle with eyes that had seen what lived in the lightless dark. “Get the gently caress out of here.”
All the color drained from the boys’ faces as they scrambled away from Ben, tripping over backpacks and nearly pitching headfirst off the loading dock in their haste to get away. Kyle looked around, disbelieving, as his “muscle” slammed the door shut behind them with such force the plexiglass panel rattled in the frame. “What the gently caress —”
Ben grabbed hold of Kyle’s arm, and the older boy threw a wild haymaker with his free hand. It bounced off Ben’s temple without so much as moving his head. Ben had a moment to savor Kyle’s confusion turning to panic before he squeezed the older boy’s wrist. Bone groaned under the pressure and Kyle shrieked, falling to his knees.
“This is what being an rear end in a top hat gets you,” Ben said casually, still squeezing. His Soul savored the punishment, drinking it in, and for the first time in days Ben’s head cleared. He enjoyed it so much he forgot Kyle was still there until the boy began to blubber. Ben let go of his wrist like he was tossing a piece of garbage. “Now gently caress off.”
Kyle yelped and scurried backward, clutching his wrist, where a bright crop of unusual bruises was already blooming. He looked at his bag and back at Ben, thought better of it and left it behind, hurrying after his friends.
“Holy poo poo,” the younger boy said when they were alone. He looked Ben over, eyes still frightened. “How did you do that?”
Ben shrugged. “People don’t gently caress with you if you don’t let them.”
“Well, thanks.” The boy smiled weakly. “They were gonna gently caress me up. Fourth time this month.” He pulled down the collar of his shirt to reveal yellowing traces of old bruises. “And all I did was scratch the big guy’s car by accident.”
“Oh really?” Ben felt his Soul stir. Maybe he could make another meal of Kyle sooner than he’d thought. He put his arm across the other boy’s shoulders, barely registering the flinch. “Tell me about it. Maybe there’s something I can do.”

quote:

In the light of reason, humans think they killed the monsters. The real ones, that is. The wolf needs their help just to survive. The only lions and tigers are in zoos. Dinosaur bones are strung up like trophies in natural history museums.
Secure in his fortress, Man tells himself he has nothing to fear.
At night, though, people sweat through the old familiar nightmares. The modern man is plunged back into the primordial dark and hounded by a predator from which he cannot escape. It is back, it is hungry, and civilization avails him nothing. He scurries through abandoned streets and primeval forests like a rat fleeing a cat.

quote:

A Beast is an atavistic throwback, a human being with the soul of a mythic monster, itself a manifestation of a fundamental fear: of the unclean and unknown, of the predator lurking in the shadows, and of forces beyond human reckoning.

quote:

In order to understand a bit more about the characters in Beast: The Primordial, here are some common beliefs and how they align with the Begotten:
• Beasts aren’t human: True. Beasts are born like humans and seem human until their Homecoming, when they discover a spiritual link to nightmare monsters — their Souls. That is when they truly become Beasts, but even before that they are not really human.

quote:

Beasts are born, not made, and reared in a world that instinctively fears them. It does not matter if she is rich or poor, hideous or lovely, gay or straight or somewhere in between. People look askance at what they know is not human even though, objectively speaking, they have no reason to fear. Not at first.
[quote]

[quote]
No blood or DNA test can tell the difference between a Beast and her human kin. She looks like them, but a living nightmare fills the gap where her humanity should be. At night, she wanders through the periphery of that nightmare, catching glimpses of her primordial Soul. Her true self.
A Beast is the first victim of her own nightmare. She is marked — defined even — by the dream that haunted her entire life. Therein is the key to her true nature.
• Charlotte flees mechanized colossi who bellow and pursue her through the city center, moving faster than she can believe. Where is safe when they can reach inside of buildings — or tear them down?
• Alina wakes to screams and the smell of smoke. Cut off from her family, she tumbles out of the window and sees the forest engulfed in fire. The image that sticks with her is deer fleeing through the streets ahead of the blaze.
• A beautiful woman beguiles Alain into the water. Leathery coils tighten around him and barbed hooks tear his flesh as she pulls him beneath the surface, and the dream implodes in a foam of blood and aborted screams.
• Jude is in a ruined, life-sized dollhouse with a forbidden room at the top. Just looking inside means death, but he goes anyway. A little girl with a distended abdomen and a spider’s body nests over an old cradle. Her jaws unhinge as she descends to greet him.
• Rick is climbing, which is his favorite hobby, when the wingspan of something huge blots out the sun. Torn from the mountain by enormous talons, he flails helplessly through the air with the wind roaring in his ears. It chose this for him. It wonders if this little man can fly.
The Beast resists for years, but the shape of her Soul comes ever closer until the nightmare bleeds into the waking world. She is never not in that place where the air reeks with the scent of charnel and the floor is scattered with human bones. Her waning hours of humanity are consumed by the same terror she will soon inflict on others. Impelled by the first pangs of Hunger, she presses through horror that is by now almost commonplace to reach the monster’s Lair.
The moment she and her animalistic Soul come face to face is a baptism of sorts. To the Soul, her human self is just another victim, one it has already tormented for years. It rears up and bellows a challenge, making the walls of its Lair shudder with the sound.
But it is time to stop running. It is time to come home.
Only when she is no longer afraid can she be whole. Thrown into the monster’s jaws one last time, the Beast triumphs over her fear by becoming it. She steps into the monster’s role and takes control for the first time.
This epiphany is her Homecoming, a word rich with bittersweet connotations. For the first time, the Beast knows what she is and where she came from. She is not a defective human being. She is not insane. She is a creature of legend.
The Beast’s eyes snap open. She and the nightmare are one.

quote:

The Beast and her Soul are one, two aspects of the same being, but their existence is fraught with tension. If her conscious self is the Ego, then her Soul is undoubtedly the Id. Its urges are blunt and instinctual: Hunt. Kill. Feed. Survive. Like the Id, the Soul cannot be reasoned or bargained with, only sated, and she must do so if she hopes to keep peace between them. Unfortunately, what the Soul demands may be abhorrent. Morality is irrelevant to its single-minded pursuit of its defining Hunger. The Predator must hunt. The Collector must take. The Tyrant must rule. These are not cravings; they are categorical imperatives.
Embracing her Hunger outright means surrendering her humanity and hence the only thing keeping her Soul in check. Shutting herself away or turning her back on people ends the same way, undoing the achievement of her Homecoming. The Soul seizes her and drags her screaming back into the nightmare.

quote:

Centuries, if not millennia, have passed, but Kinship cannot be denied. Beasts have many ways to aid their cousins and bring them back into the fold: helping feed their Hungers, alien though they may be, augmenting their supernatural abilities, and even teaching them how to walk the Primordial Pathways again. If their bond is strong enough, Beasts can even bring them into their Lairs.
Beasts put their cousins in perspective as Family members or entire lost lineages, but this understanding does not cut both ways. Ironically, other supernatural beings are likely to believe every Beast is unique. One werewolf is much like another. Not so Ugallu. What do a roc, a wyvern, and a storm-demon have in common, from a vampire’s perspective?
That said, supernatural beings are used to sharing the world with other monsters, some of whom even Beasts do not understand. Allies — or pawns — are invaluable against their common enemy, human hunters, as well as other adversaries. Temporary alliances sometimes grow into sprawling, extended families of mixed monsters.

quote:

The wolf must hunt. Bound by this law, Uratha embody the Hunger for the Prey; they are blood brothers to Beasts with similar appetites, right down to competition over who is the better predator. Their pack loyalty more than makes up for any conflict, though, if they can be won as friends. Moreover, Uratha have a natural affinity for the Primordial Pathways, which are not too different from navigating the Shadow.

quote:

The Unchained are extraordinarily secretive and seem to hold the Children in contempt.

quote:

Encounters frequently terminate in violence and vicious rivalry, particularly if the Beast sees through the demon’s human façade. The stories of the God-Machine that Beasts have pieced
together lead them to believe demons are something new: industrial age monsters masquerading as divinity. Whatever they are, they are not kin.

quote:

Beasts band together for the same reasons humans do: camaraderie, convenience, and mutual protection. They lack the world-spanning secret societies of mages and vampires, but the bonds they share are far more intimate. Indeed, the brood is Beast society as far as its members are concerned. Each is a surrogate family with its own territory defined by their collective influence on the Primordial Dream and how many people they affect. A brood can host any combination, not just Family members. Even other creatures, such as vampires and werewolves, are welcome to join.

quote:

A trucker lumbers out of his booth and settles up. Sin-you knows what comes next. He smelled it in the man’s dime-store deodorant, and he sees it in the exact change he counts out over the cash
register. Not a nickel over the bill. The hostess forces a smile as she drops a receipt like a piece of garbage.
Sin-you’s smile stretches like a stab wound.

tatankatonk posted:

I FOUND IT
I FOUND THE BEAST WHO FEEDS ON PEOPLE NOT TIPPING


WITNESS ME

quote:

Miles away, the trucker’s mind is wandering up the interstate. The waitress he pinched. The waiter he called a human being. The call girl with the bloody lip. They’re crawling over the walls of his cabin, tearing out soft pieces of his body and screaming obscenities he can’t hear but understands in the pit of his belly. He pulls his rig onto a side road before it slams into a concrete barrier.
“Guilty,” says Sin-you. Most obvious thing in the world. An ivory spike, notched like a horn, rips through the trucker’s heart, and Sin-you gorges on judgment. It’ll be his seventh this month, but no one ever sees the pattern of his justice. Not between Juneau and Houston.

quote:

When a Beast is nearly full to bursting, her Nightmares flow. As the Soul grows content and slothful, the Beast wrests away a scrap of its strength. With that borrowed power, she commands fear with the precision of a general.
A sated Beast knows how to break out her prey’s best terrors. She knows how her victim obsesses over his looks, and his nagging suspicion that if they fade, he will too. She knows all about his dreams of limbs melting like wax, and of a fast, anonymous decay into old age. She knows how to make fear fact. Now, whenever a chill hits the air, his bones ache and his hands tremble, and whenever he looks in his mirror, he sees what he’ll become.
A sated Beast can tear away mental blocks. Drugs, therapy, and money went into repressing his hit-and-run, but the Beast makes sure her victim still dreams of the homeless woman he killed, dying as her blood leaks memories into shattered glass. The slurs of pedestrians. The agonies of withdrawal. He sees her in every beggar downtown and in his own shadow as he turns the lights out.
A sated Beast takes the pain that threw her victim’s life into a spiral of self-hatred and sorrow and says I can do better. She tortures the world until it feeds her again.

quote:

But as the Soul gluts on the Beast’s victims, its appetites grow more exacting. It won’t take just any gold or murder; it takes Fort Knox bullion and ritualized serial killing. The Soul has no use for temperance when gluttony is a virtue.
Then again, that can become too much of a good thing. As the stomach swells, the muscles wither. If a Beast gorges herself to capacity, her Soul falls into a food coma, slumbering in the Heart of her Lair. That leaves the Beast as weak as any human. If her enemies find her dazed atop her hoard, with her belly for the world to see, the Soul won’t stir from sleep to save her hide.

quote:

Starvation is fire. Skin blisters as the Beast forges weapons from her own body, with the hammer of the Soul’s mania shaping her designs. In exchange for pain, the unsated Beast gains focus and guile, and as her Hunger pangs grow, so do her Atavisms. Her irises warp into daggers and venom drips from her claws. She can smell threats that others can’t and sees the labels of friend or foe in every stranger. She becomes the pinnacle of survival, at least until the next meal.
The masses see her more clearly, of course. That’s the risk that comes with reward. If a Beast expends her reserves or goes without a meal too long, her Soul goes feral. It has no logic to understand poor feeding prospects, nor the motives that might put its Beast on a diet. It has needs that outweigh consequence. It shatters the confines of the Lair and hunts through human nightmares, leaving night terrors in its wake.

tatankatonk posted:

I FOUND IT
I FOUND THE BEAST WHO FEEDS ON PEOPLE NOT TIPPING


WITNESS ME

quote:

Luka’s a Predator, the kind who uses every part, from skin to sinew. Zie thinks other carnivores are the best prey, and being hunted in return gives hir a special sort of thrill. Normally zie’d describe hirself as a conservationist, but sometimes the bleeding hearts go too far. The new laws mean a lot more rangers snooping around the woods looking for poachers. If they catch hir with a bloody bowie knife and a bear carcass, zie’ll have to answer uncomfortable questions. Luka’s Soul is hunting on its own now, and it’s acquiring brand new tastes. Ugly ones.

quote:

They say that internal affairs is for slimeballs, and that describes Hollis well. He’s always had a strong sense of right and wrong, as well as an unerring eye for to exploit that quality for his own edification. Woe to the cop who comes across his desk, because whether or not she’s right, she’ll always be wrong. Playing that game can be delicate, though, and now he’s faltered. He’s been suspended for all kinds of violations (if only they knew), and the review board’s going to throw the book at him. Starving outside his red tape empire, it’s time for Hollis to make good on his rolodex of spite. Time to show these cops what justice really is.

quote:

The Beast who walks the middle path walks a tightrope. Middle Satiety gives her a clear head, neither softened by the sloth of fullness, nor gripped by the anxiety of starvation. But that’s the opportunity the Hero’s waiting for. Half-full Beasts are out of communion with their Souls. The primordial self doesn’t care what side the Beast chooses, but it can’t abide the middle. It wants rage or contentment. It wants anything but boredom.
Beasts in the middle are open to Anathemas, the banes Heroes exploit to strike at the hearts of their foes. Anathemas take many forms, from holy spears to words of power, but what the Hero believes to be a fissure in the Beast’s armor is really something he forces on her. Anathemas are the ultimate expression of the Hero’s egomania: the belief that a Beast could have a weakness. When a Beast is soft from the Soul’s dissatisfaction, the Hero can wrench the narrative back in his favor.

quote:

Pompeii, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima. These are the Ravager’s fantasy getaways: anywhere the restless dead are anchored by disaster. The Ravager’s not interested in helping them, though. He wants to revel in mass destruction, to make his Lair an instrument of entropy. No better way to learn of death than from those who can’t escape it.

quote:

Fellow Beasts aren’t the only resources the Begotten have, though. Other monsters are the foundations of the World of Darkness, and their secrets are terrifyingly potent. Vampires have spent millennia building a society predicated on one big secret, while mages are addicted to solving mysteries in a reality they think to be a lie. It’s only natural that Beasts would want in on
the action. Through Kinship, a Beast can expand her Lair further, or even learn new Nightmares modeled on the aptitudes of other monsters. With a little care, she can even feed her Hunger.
The vampire spreads madness. Shunned by mortals and Kindred alike, she’s going to fall to a deep slumber if she keeps going hungry. Asklepian wants to help and offers her shelter for service. The little starving vampire can crack sanity with her bite the way he crushes ribcages with his coils, and every brain she breaks for him becomes a ward in the madhouse of his Lair.

illrepute posted:

Who on earth kickstarted this?

tatankatonk posted:

This should be said really often: you are not doing LGBTQ people, or feminists, or whoever is standing in opposition to internet trolls/homophobes/MRAs or whatever, a favor by associating them with this.


good gravy


I'm not going to lie: if I didn't know anything about Heroes, I would be insanely confused at this point in the pdf. I would think: So they're the good guys, right? Because they want to stop these monsters, who have to kill, or kill but in really specific ways, or just kill, torture, and terrorize sometimes but not enough to drift to the extremes? Right?


Talk about insulting the dead.


Malkavia plays a big part in my game. It's sad to see it reduced to this

Oh poo poo it's Hero time

Loomer posted:

Lunatics, mostly.

Roland Jones posted:

I am pretty sure the Malkavians would look on this with scorn.

But yeah in all seriousness this is baffling. Demon: The Descent was amazing. This is terrible. How on earth is this following that? Is it, like, a completely different team or something?

Crion posted:

Nope. Shares a lead dev with Demon, in fact.

illrepute posted:

Who on earth kickstarted this?

quote:

Take a high school bully, mate him with a rabid dog, and a Hero is born. The saying goes that fanatics redouble their efforts when they lose sight of their aims; if so, Heroes are an exceptional breed of fanatic. Their efforts leave no room to be redoubled, and their aims are barely coherent to begin with.
Strip down the layers of a Hero’s ego, and all one finds is murder. Murder is his only end, regardless of bystanders. He’ll bloviate about the little girls and puppies he saves, but at the best of times, protecting the innocent is incidental. He pursues the Beast because she dares to live and breathe and occupy the same world he does, not because some fool needs rescuing. It’s an imperative a serial killer might understand.

quote:

The man at the butcher shop remembers when his neighborhood was safe to walk at night. It’s the coddled kids, he mutters. Whelps raised up without the belt, like the punk who comes in and mouths off about the quality of his cuts. She’s the problem. All the little shits like her. He sees that clearly in his nightmares, in the eyes of the spider wrapping its webs over town. He’ll spread his own webs soon, made from cotton twine and clear, sterile plastic.
She’s the richest woman in town, a woman whose generosity knows no bounds. The local activists know a crook when they see one. They know her philanthropy is a front for...something. The specifics aren’t important. The further they dig, the more her secrets consume their lives. Most of them haven’t been to their real jobs in weeks. The walls of their offices are plastered with tax forms and stationary stained with garbage water. Beneath soiled pizza boxes, a blueprint of her house is marked up, and a bomb diagram is pasted over a barrel of gasoline.
Her boyfriend’s got a musk that only she can smell, like his core is rotten with worms. Like it’s leaking discharge through his skin. She could scrub down to bone and never get that stench out. It’s all she can talk about. That’s why nobody likes her anymore. She can’t stop droning on and on and on about how he’s weighing her down. He’s the reason she wasn’t promoted! He’s the reason her best friend dumped her! He’s the reason she’s a failure. One night, she wakes up and understands what the smell really is. The gun in the dresser could cleanse him, she thinks.

quote:

To a degree, the Begotten understand the Heroic drive. Whether it’s for piles of gold or slaughtered prey, Beasts are equally slaves to instinct. The difference between a Beast’s lust and a Hero’s obsession is self-awareness. A Beast knows she’s crazy. She learns to live with it or she suffers. Justifications miss the point of having a Hunger in the first place. A Hero, on the other hand, will twist his brain to rationalize his hatred. It’s the same defense abusers cling to: blame the victim. Understanding that pathology makes the difference between a Beast with a Legend and a Beast with an encyclopedia entry.
The Collector promises the Hero a fight for the ages, but he has to play her game first. Otherwise, she’ll go to ground and never come back up. She sends him a list of objects, a fetch quest with an endpoint in her Lair. The items are both junky and occult, from literal trash to rare spices available only through import. He gathers them and expends every resource he has. On completion, the Collector makes good. He finds her stooped over an effigy, fashioned from refuse and smelling of magic. Before he can run, she lights it with her breath, and his skin bubbles off.
The Nemesis lives up to her name. She finds the Hero’s phone number and records long, rambling messages listing every infraction he’s guilty of over the course of a single day. Then she hacks his email and distributes screeds he’s written about his bosses. Then she calls his wife
and claims to be his mistress. Then she calls his mistress and claims to be his wife. By the time he seeks revenge, no one will care if he lives or dies.
The Predator burns for the hunt. His mind is overwhelmed with designs for weapons and traps. He’s been sick for prey that fights back and he doesn’t want to disappoint his self-appointed enemy. He rents a cabin off the grid so they’ll have a little privacy, so the Hero will know that he’s poured his heart into this. That she’s a special kind of prey. Not that he’s going to fight fair, of course — fair fights are for humans.
The Ravager goes to war. Wrecked the Hero’s car? Check. Burnt his house down? Check. Frozen his accounts? Trickier, but check. She’ll shred the Hero’s life until all that’s left is his fight with her.
Resource management isn’t just a knack, it’s the Tyrant’s ideology. When the Hero and his gang invade her compound, they’re outflanked by her legions. While snipers slaughter his men, the Hero manages to dash inside. He only loses a finger to the Rottweilers, but the mercenaries are more generous with the pieces they cut off. When they drag him before her throne, she barely needs to finish him off. But she will.

Cabbit posted:

Maybe they made a really middle of the road game, then removed all the terrible stuff and called it Demon. Then they took all that terrible stuff they took out and called that Beast.

quote:

Incarnate

This is the monster who rewrote the tale. He’s the Beast other Beasts fear. He and his Soul see eye-to-eye and tooth-to-tooth. They become one body without the cost of the Beast’s Life, a being with no need for solid flesh who walks as mortal or monster at the whim of dreams. He transcends the bounds of his Legend without feeding, yet fears no Heroes. He needs no spool of thread to navigate his Lair. He is his Lair.
The Apex Beast is one who opts out of destiny. He is a Beast so steeped in the narrative of his Legend that he knows all the twists before they come up. No plot points go unforeseen: not when his brood betrays him for his hoard, nor even when his own sister takes up the mantle of Hero. Through this self-awareness, he sees the tapestry of his fate laid out in full, dyed with the blood of his Family: the monster, the warrior, the confrontation. The slaying.
He gazes at the loom of inevitability and rips out the threads.
Beasts kill Heroes all the time and gain little but worm food. A Beast who lusts for transcendence doesn’t waste time on nickel-and-dime Heroes. His enemy is a worthy foe, and he makes a mockery of that. He betrays Gilgamesh. He devours Saint George. He burns every piece of Osiris until only ash and Isis’s tears remain.

quote:

The Hero of the story is an earthly paragon. He’s the light that holds the dark at bay. He takes up the call to adventure, he learns wisdom and sacrifice, he dies and resurrects. He’s Dionysus, Jesus, and Rama.
The villain of the story is a Beast. She’s a raw element, razing villages and befouling crops, with no inner life beyond sin. An obstacle for the Hero to overcome. That’s all she’s meant for in this model, though perhaps she can rise to the lofty heights of moral of the story (Don’t become a monster, children.). But that’s the best she gets.
It’s not always so literal, but the monomyth — what Joseph Campbell called the Hero’s Journey — is so basic that it’s difficult to find stories that don’t follow it. It’s the founding narrative of Western literature, religion, and art, from Shakespeare to the Bible to Die Hard.
Beasts know this song and dance well. They see it every time some psycho loner shows up with a machete and a death wish. That doesn’t mean they play along, however. Beasts call out narratives. They undermine them. They break them over the heads of Heroes.

quote:

The Hero has expectations. Forget his delusions and his ego, and even forget the monster that made him a zealot in the first place. It’s not the Beast who taught him how the tale is told. He goes to the movies; he reads books; he plays video games. His culture’s rammed the plot into him since he could understand words. The story belongs to him.
Sometimes the Hero’s not perfect, but it’s always about him, no matter how dynamic the villain may be. The Hero could be summed up in totality by his chiseled jaw and his big gun, but the camera always owes allegiance to his shallow perspective. That structure manipulates us into believing what the Hero believes: that deviation is abnormal, immoral, and subversive. These narratives build him into the worst kind of Hollywood mogul, the director-writer-producer-star, wrapped up in a crusader’s moral compass.
Beasts set out with the same cultural cues as their nemeses, but they learn to see through the self- aggrandizing Heroic media. The Beast knows the Hero doesn’t earn his title without her. The
story isn’t told if the monster doesn’t burn the countryside. This is the truth Heroes can never hide; the Beast is the actor. The Hero reacts, defined by what he opposes, doomed to wait out his miserable life hoping some troll will carry off a goat.

illrepute posted:

What happens if a Beast just gets a TF:V JDAM dropped on his head instead of being offed by heroes?

illrepute posted:

What happens if a Beast just gets a TF:V JDAM dropped on his head instead of being offed by heroes?

Crion posted:

Then you are, by definition, playing a Hunter or crossover game. This is not the correct way to play Beast.

illrepute posted:

I'm just wondering, is there a contingency plan for justifying the Beast's behavior if they open the door and instead of a bunch of MRA-caricature heroes, there's instead a full division of TF:V guys with tanks?

illrepute posted:

I'm just wondering, is there a contingency plan for justifying the Beast's behavior if they open the door and instead of a bunch of MRA-caricature heroes, there's instead a full division of TF:V guys with tanks?

Crion posted:

The book defines this as using Beasts as antagonists in a game of Hunter.

Crion posted:

The book defines this as using Beasts as antagonists in a game of Hunter.

illrepute posted:

I'm just wondering, is there a contingency plan for justifying the Beast's behavior if they open the door and instead of a bunch of MRA-caricature heroes, there's instead a full division of TF:V guys with tanks?

Is this the for-real instruction in the book? I admit, I have.. sorta let my eyes slide over a lot of what's been posted.

quote:

In Chapters Two and Five, we mention that in order for a person to become a Hero, his Integrity rating can be no greater than four. For purposes of creating Hero characters, that’s all you need to know, but it’s important to unpack that idea so that you understand why that’s the case and what it means for Heroes.
Integrity, as explained in Chapter Four, is a game trait measuring the health of a person’s soul and self-image. Integrity does not, by itself, measure whether a person is “good” or not. It is not a measure of kindness or compassion. Certainly people with high Integrity traits tend to be strong of character, and strength of character leads to empathy and compassion, but it is possible to have a high Integrity rating and be harsh, cruel, or even violent. It simply means that the character is well aware of who and what he is.

Incipient Heroes, though, lack that awareness. Their souls are weak, whether by nature or by difficult lives whittling away their Integrity. They tend to be shortsighted, self-centered (but not self-aware), and unfocused. A person can fall to this level of Integrity in any number of ways; when you are designing Heroes for your Beast chronicle, it’s worthwhile to consider how it happened. You don’t need to design breaking points for the character (though you can), nor do you need to detail how any given dot of Integrity was lost, but just a general sense of what happened to the character is enough. Did the character avoid talking to people out of belief that he was better? Did the character suffer some hardship and look for someone else to blame? Or is the answer more basic — is the character an abuser or a bully?

As noted in Chapter Four, it’s possible to lose Integrity from exposure to the supernatural, but this by itself doesn’t usually reduce the trait low enough to qualify a person for becoming a Hero. Thematically, too, it’s not appropriate for someone whose only “crime” was bearing witness to the supernatural to become a Hero. Since Heroes are Storyteller-controlled character, you as Storyteller dictate why the Hero is the way he is, so make choices that allow the Hero to fulfill the appropriate role in the story. If the Hero is a sympathetic character, driven to hunt monsters by the relentless attacks of the supernatural, then you might be better served checking out Hunter: The Vigil (and perhaps using Beasts as antagonists). If, however, the Hero has deliberately shunned other people, defining himself by what he is not, what he hates, or the wrongs done to him, that’s a perfect candidate.

When a Beast’s Soul inflicts a nightmare on a suitable candidate, the incipient Hero’s soul is overwhelmed by the power of the Beast. The Hero’s soul is weak, remember, and lacking in definition and purpose. With the introduction of the Beast, the Hero finds that purpose and definition. That is why Heroes are universally obsessive, and that is why they cannot help but to try and find and kill Beasts. This is also why killing Beasts gives them power, but killing other supernatural creatures does not. By destroying a Beast, they feed their own withered souls, giving them purpose and motivation. It doesn’t increase their Integrity ratings, but it acts as a sop for the void in their lives.

Of course, if a Hero’s Integrity were to rise above four dots, his soul would gain enough strength to ignore the Beast and develop other interests. At that point, it is possible that the Hero continues to focus on his quest to kill Beasts, but he gains no gifts or benefit from doing so (and indeed, might even lose Integrity, allowing the cycle to continue). If he abandons the hunt and continues to live his life in a way that allows for further Integrity gain, he can strengthen his soul the way any normal human being can. Good, bad, or otherwise, the ex-Hero gains enough psychic definition that he no longer needs to pursue his role as “slayer of monsters.” Likewise, a Hero who raises his Integrity to 5 or more loses his Legend/Life and replaces them with the more standard Virtue and Vice (p. XX). In effect, the character is no longer a Hero.
Beasts are, for the most part, unaware of any of this; and as such it’s mostly behind-the-scenes information for the Storyteller. But if a Beast were to somehow help a Hero to, for want of a better phrase, grow up, she reaps an immediate benefit: No one is trying to kill her. Her Soul, however, probably wants nothing to do with this process, and indeed, killing a Hero always gains a Beast Satiety. If the Beast truly wants to help a Hero to transcend his quest, the best bet is to avoid his notice, leave him alone, and let him figure it out on his own. A Beast doesn’t have that choice, though, when the Hero comes knocking on her door.

tatankatonk posted: