|
Rand Brittain posted:Executing a mage is more complicated but if mages aren't a secret society it just takes, like, wizard policemen or something. It's not something you have to leave up to the one cult out of five that's most willing to handle executions for you. Pretty sure part of the Guardians concept is "wizard policemen", at least based on their book.
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2015 20:42
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 8, 2024 17:00 |
|
|
Kellsterik posted:Pretty sure part of the Guardians concept is "wizard policemen", at least based on their book. All Orders are partly a mundane concept (police, academics, soldiers) mixed with apocalyptic cults.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2015 20:48
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:Executing a mage is more complicated but if mages aren't a secret society it just takes, like, wizard policemen or something. It's not something you have to leave up to the one cult out of five that's most willing to handle executions for you. I'm not sure there's as much daylight between "wizard police" and "a cult of sociopaths who self-select to undertake violence in defense of the status quo" as you suggest.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2015 20:52
|
|
|
Guardians of the Veil, biggest (wizard) gang in America #ScelestiLivesMatter
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2015 20:56
|
|
|
Im also thinking their job would be to make sure mages arent interfering too much in mortal affairs. (Like dominating the US prez for example)
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2015 21:27
|
|
|
Turn them into the Taliban
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2015 22:49
|
|
|
My suggestion would be to keep magic public, but keep the identity and makeup of Mage society secret, and leave the Guardians as the secret police.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2015 23:03
|
|
|
There's also no reason why GoV couldn't be the cleaners who take care of particularly off-message, public-opinion-unfriendly mages. I think the group that gets Real weird in the face of Out magic is the Silver Ladder, who end up looking an awful lot like Scientology that can back up its claims.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2015 23:12
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:If mages are public, are mage executioners really necessary? We have ordinary executioners for that. Magic being public doesn't mean that all or even most mages are public, though.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2015 23:13
|
|
|
How long has magic been "out?" If it's been a while the Guardians of the Veil probably have a different name, at least. heh, more like Guardians of the Fail, says local idiot libertine
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2015 00:41
|
|
|
They could be in a kind of transition or failure state, turning their knives on themselves in internal warfare over who let the cat out of the bag while their leaders retreat into exile to await the Hieromagus. They don't need to have adapted successfully to publicized magic.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2015 01:59
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:Magic being public doesn't mean that all or even most mages are public, though. Wouldn't there be even more incentives to keep your mojo secret? Who's going to be the Tony Stark to introduce the Mage Registration Act...
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2015 07:02
|
|
|
I depends on whether you mean public as in Magic Best Buy, or public as in organized crime. We know there's an actual Mafia(s) and see media portraying it with various degrees of accuracy, but few of us will ever notice its influence or really know how it operates. It's entirely possible to have a scenario where people superficially accept magic but the Sleeping Curse still operates, so few people have first hand knowledge of what sorcerers do because magic doesn't work well around them or they forget about it. Sleeper authorities probably rely on wizards loyal to the state for deep cover operations and no-knock, Fate-obscured raids against criminals. In this scenario, the Free Council are probably split between punks and Sleeper loyalists, the Guardians determine who gets Made, the Silver Ladder fracture between community representatives and internal management, the Adamantine Arrow provide enforcers and the Mysterium are knowledge mercenaries. Meanwhile the Seer Ministries play bigger geopolitical games completely integrated into the Sleeper system, and may provide the bulk of law enforcement and state magical power in exchange for cop-like privilege and a percentage that makes their enterprises too big to fail.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2015 09:57
|
|
|
Im thinking like "true blood" public.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2015 12:46
|
|
|
DJ Dizzy posted:Im thinking like "true blood" public. Everybody knows it's real but it's not always clear whether a particular person is a vampire/mage and the nature of the supers' internal organization (hell, its existence) is very deliberately being kept secret from the public?
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2015 12:52
|
|
|
I would think yeah, the role of the Guardians becomes secret police and informers. They're the ones that tattle to the Arrow that a particular Mage is left-handed, performing abominable sins against wisdom, or engaging in wanton Paradox. Likewise, they can report to the Silver Ladder Sleepers who are dangerous to the mage political cause, identify Mages who are not good for PR, and quietly eliminate any of the above rather than going in guns blazing.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2015 20:27
|
|
|
http://gizmodo.com/the-fembots-of-ashley-madison-1726670394 In the data dump of Ashley Madison’s internal emails, I found ample evidence that the company was actively paying people to create fake profiles. Sometimes they outsourced to companies who build fake profiles, like the ones Caitlin Dewey wrote about this week in the Washington Post. But many appear to have been generated by people working for Ashley Madison. The company even had a shorthand for these fake profiles—“angels.”
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2015 15:16
|
|
 This is a plot by the God-Machine to generate enough essence from the embarrassment of Ashley Madison employees and users to build an angel that will build another angel that will make sure a man named Howard Smalls will win the lottery with the winning numbers of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 and then be hit by a drunk driver on his way to collect to his winnings.
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2015 15:41
|
|
|
That is convoluted even for the G-M
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2015 21:46
|
|
|
I'm reading Steel Ball Run these days, and it's really making me want to run a game of Werewolf the Wyld West. The Storm Eater and the Broken Ones are a great excuse to send all kind of weird poo poo against my players.
|
|
#
?
Aug 29, 2015 21:11
|
|
|
I Googled to check and I'm both a thread and several months late in saying this already, but if you post in this thread and you haven't seen What We Do In The Shadows then you need to fix that right away. It's literally 'medium-sized town World of Darkness' as a mockumentary. "Vampires have had a pretty bad rap. We're not these mopey old creatures who live in castles. Well, most of us are... a lot are, but.... There are those of us who like to flat together in small countries like New Zealand." -- opening quote
|
|
#
?
Aug 29, 2015 23:49
|
|
|
Which is actually pretty much Australia's vampire history in WoD, too. Bunch of younger vampires hosed off down here to get away from their stuffy elders and all go autarkis.
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2015 04:34
|
|
|
Don't forget 'And every attempt to bring the Sabbat or Camarilla to bear down there makes the packs/coteries all die, and we don't know why'
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2015 09:33
|
|
|
Well, not exactly. Most of the place is nominally one or the other.
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2015 09:55
|
|
|
SunAndSpring posted:
But what does it mean?!?!
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2015 10:13
|
|
|
I know you're joking but this is at once what I like and what I hate about the God Machine. It generates conspiracy as an afterthought and more often than not the short term reason why it engages in incredibly convoluted plots is "because magic", which feels unsatisfying as a player. How do people avoid that in their games?
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2015 17:56
|
|
|
Mendrian posted:I know you're joking but this is at once what I like and what I hate about the God Machine. It generates conspiracy as an afterthought and more often than not the short term reason why it engages in incredibly convoluted plots is "because magic", which feels unsatisfying as a player.
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2015 18:00
|
|
|
Mendrian posted:I know you're joking but this is at once what I like and what I hate about the God Machine. It generates conspiracy as an afterthought and more often than not the short term reason why it engages in incredibly convoluted plots is "because magic", which feels unsatisfying as a player. Demon straight-out says that the convoluted plots should have no discernible reason, and that stopping a GM plot should have no apparent consequences to the GM, because gently caress having anything you do ever matter, I guess?
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2015 18:11
|
|
|
Mendrian posted:I know you're joking but this is at once what I like and what I hate about the God Machine. It generates conspiracy as an afterthought and more often than not the short term reason why it engages in incredibly convoluted plots is "because magic", which feels unsatisfying as a player. Any time I've played with the God Machine as a plot device, the more pressing and immediate threat to the players tends to be Angels which represent the God Machine's purpose, or cultists who don't care what the God Machine is doing, or why. Even if it might seem out-of-character, an Angel who goes out of his way to make it personal with the PCs makes good enough motivation that the PCs don't stop to ask why the GM is doing what it does. A notable example in a game of Demon I played, once, featured a church as one of those weird GM dead zones where Angels can't really do much if they go in, but Angels needed to get at one of the priests within the church. Long story short, the Angels ended up holding one of our Demons' loved ones hostage, her release dependent upon our delivery of the priest in question. What the God Machine wants with the priest is one thing or another, but none of the PCs were very much concerned with its intentions when the people they cared about were in immediate danger.
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2015 18:17
|
|
|
LatwPIAT posted:Demon straight-out says that the convoluted plots should have no discernible reason, and that stopping a GM plot should have no apparent consequences to the GM, because gently caress having anything you do ever matter, I guess? Matrices have Outputs and those Outputs should be superficially understandable. The immediate or localized goals of whatever given project is the kind of thing the players should be able to deduce or at least guess at. Maybe adopt the Uncertainty Principle as a rule of thumb. But loving with Infrastructure is literally playing God so prudent demons should always prepare for unforseen consequences.
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2015 18:32
|
|
LatwPIAT posted:Demon straight-out says that the convoluted plots should have no discernible reason, and that stopping a GM plot should have no apparent consequences to the GM, because gently caress having anything you do ever matter, I guess? Demon takes as its main inspiration Le Carré novels and Cold War spy fiction more generally, so this is entirely appropriate. One spy could never have ended the Cold War singlehandedly. The most you can do is make a moral stand and either succeed (and usually die) or fail (and usually live).
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2015 00:37
|
|
|
I might actually run that Wyld West game: I've got at least one player interested, maybe more. The premise of the game is that, while canonically the Twin Moons pack is the one who defeat the Storm Eater in 1890, they wouldn't have been able too if another pack (my PCs) hadn't killed the Storm Eater's most powerful servants a few years prior. The Storm Eater would simply have been too powerful for the Rite of Stilled Skies to work. The main antagonists are then the eight Storm Walkers, which the players will have to hunt down and kill all across America before their various schemes to empower the Storm Eater are fulfilled. This way, I can fully use the Storm Umbra to send all kind of weird poo poo agaisnt my players, Jojo style.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2015 04:37
|
|
|
Thinking on it, one of my least favourite parts - outright hated in fact - is that they had the Kuei-jin try and conquer Australia and partly succeed in doing. The idea of the Yellow Peril never really died here, so it is very distadteful to me for WW to go "yeah, those inscrutable easterners are coming to steal your land and your people'. Its a lot less 'removed' than the same ideology in California - we still publish best sellers based entirely on those drat yella people trying to steal our country; hell, we have politicians whose success comes entirely from playing to that crowd. ( it also really muddies the waters of opposing Chinese corporate ownership of our agriculture, energy, and resources. Those of us who do are attacked for invoking the yellow peril even if we oppose ANY foreign ownership of the sort, amd half the opposition to it literally are racists. Bloody annoying.)
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2015 07:03
|
|
|
Effectronica posted:Demon takes as its main inspiration Le Carré novels and Cold War spy fiction more generally, so this is entirely appropriate. One spy could never have ended the Cold War singlehandedly. The most you can do is make a moral stand and either succeed (and usually die) or fail (and usually live). There's a huge excluded middle between "one spy ending the Cold War singlehandedly" and "nothing you do can ever have meaning or apparent consequences". Like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which starts off with 'there's a spy in MI6, Smiley, please find the bastard', and then Smiley finds the bastard and Karla no longer has a spy in MI6 and his plot to spy on the US is foiled. The motivations and consequences of that plot are readily apparent, and it ends in a bittersweet victory, but still a clear victory for British Intelligence (as does Smiley's People, which ends in a resounding victory). The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is an emotionally draining tale, but that doesn't mean that the character's actions are without discernible reason or consequence.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2015 14:49
|
|
|
LatwPIAT posted:There's a huge excluded middle between "one spy ending the Cold War singlehandedly" and "nothing you do can ever have meaning or apparent consequences". Like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which starts off with 'there's a spy in MI6, Smiley, please find the bastard', and then Smiley finds the bastard and Karla no longer has a spy in MI6 and his plot to spy on the US is foiled. The motivations and consequences of that plot are readily apparent, and it ends in a bittersweet victory, but still a clear victory for British Intelligence (as does Smiley's People, which ends in a resounding victory). The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is an emotionally draining tale, but that doesn't mean that the character's actions are without discernible reason or consequence. You're sort of right here, I think. Le Carre's books pretty consistently make the point that nominal victories in the Cold War are moral losses, though. Reading Tinker Tailor between the lines gives the distinct impression that everyone already knew who the mole was, and that Smiley's job was just to rip the bandaid off, as it were. They certainly don't thank him for it; The Honorable Schoolboy shows a Circus stripped down to the insulation with no money, no agents, and no way to pretend England is even the slightest bit relevant. At the end Smiley gets bumped out for people who are better at sucking up to the Americans, and the Circus effectively becomes an annex of the CIA. Smiley ultimately punishes Karla for his one moment of decency and humanity, and there's a bit of enthusing again about how impressed the Americans will be, which is a hell of a way to measure a victory. Not that I'd actually want to play a le Carre character in a game, their lives are so relentlessly depressing that the only thing for them to do would be to find another line of work. Demons don't have that option, so the inspiration they take from le Carre is that you have to define your own stakes if you want to stay sane. You're not going to significantly derail the God-Machine any more than you can win the Cold War, just as it's not clear what either of those would look like - if the God-Machine started malfunctioning tomorrow, how could you even tell? The critical thing here is that the God-Machine isn't your nemesis. The God-Machine isn't Karla. The God-Machine is Russia, and Russia doesn't want things, not intelligible things. Karla wants things. You have to narrow the scope of your conflict. Say you find out that the God-Machine's going to set off a dirty bomb in Elephant Butte, New Mexico in order to influence a struggling author's work such that his next novel is a best-seller that produces a specific psychic engram in the reader. Your ring manages to stop the plot in the nick of time, hurrah! Later you find out that a French children's TV show has started broadcasting subliminal messages that produce the engram anyway. So you didn't really stop the G-M's plan, and you're not even sure what the goal was, or how to identify a goal from an endless chain of IF-THENs. But ~1400 people are alive who wouldn't be if you hadn't intervened, and you sleep pretty good that night. *That's* the victory, in the tiny part of the actual struggle you've marked off and said 'this is mine'.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2015 16:58
|
|
|
LatwPIAT posted:Demon straight-out says that the convoluted plots should have no discernible reason, and that stopping a GM plot should have no apparent consequences to the GM, because gently caress having anything you do ever matter, I guess? I don't remember getting that impression from the book. Which parts did you get that from? I could believe that's in there somewhere, but there's also a bit that talks about angels lacking free will or personal preference, which runs counter to the premise of the Fall. It's admittedly not a hard pitfall to fall into. I tend to take my major cue from the sidebar at the end of the God-Machine Chronicle's Introduction, which stresses the immediate consequences of dealing with a global angel-machine, and the validity of partial victories and successful stands. Local projects should have some kind of visible impact on the community the ring has settled around. Sure, there might be subsidiary projects around that just reroute essence lines or maintain cult hiring procedures. Those Projects Are Boring. The story isn't about them, don't waste time on them unless the ring comes up with some way to use them as a weapon against the interesting projects. It can be tempting to go whole hog with schemes involving numerological distribution of outdated newspapers, but demons investigating that scheme ought to be able to get some idea of what the newspapers are meant to do without having to foil the whole scheme before they find out, whether it's by occult analysis or working your way through conspirators to interrogate. At the root should be some kind of compelling output or side effect. It makes monsters; it kidnaps people; it monitors your movements; it equips hunter angels. The rest is just (fun) window dressing. I don't tend to focus much on the end-goal of banishing the God-Machine or creating the Freedom Dimension or the like, in part because, honestly, Demon's mechanical support largely breaks down at that level. But I felt the need for practical impact was pretty apparent. Maybe I'm too used to just ignoring some passages to substitute game design instincts.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2015 17:05
|
|
|
Dammit Who? posted:You're sort of right here, I think. Consider, though, how brutally the God Machine deprotagonizes Demons.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2015 18:15
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:Consider, though, how brutally the God Machine deprotagonizes Demons. Hell, the drat deprotagonization?
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2015 18:17
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:Consider, though, how brutally the God Machine deprotagonizes Demons. Yeah, it's pretty great. They are basically fighting gravity on moral grounds and they can absolutely never know that everything they do isn't part of the intended order of the God-Machine. It's not like it's a person, there's nobody they can rail against. There's no office they can break into and SURPRISE, the hidden diary of the God-Machine. They can't even say there are meaningfully opposing the God-Machine on the small scale to any real degree, because they don't know what any of it really means in the end. Angels don't question, demons question and get no answers.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2015 18:38
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 8, 2024 17:00 |
|
|
Demonchat should usurp Magechat as the thing that always comes round again, because Demon has just as much to talk about. I'mma just quote myself from last thread for how I see it: quote:The God-Machine is a monster you can't punch, The Man without a state to smash, The Virus without a cure to make. You may as well declare war on weak nuclear forces. The fact that demons can do that and actually make some degree of difference is why Demon rules. On the view of the grand scale, the God-Machine is unbeatable barring cosmic shenanigans. On the local scale, though, you can thwart its plans, ruin decades of careful preparation, kill its agents, and even drive it out of an area completely if it decides it's not worth the effort. It's a grassroots movement against Robot God. As Dammit Who? and the others say, demons have to pick their own definition of victory (and Hell). Just because a victory is small - infinitesimal, even, in the grand scheme - doesn't mean it's not worth fighting for, to a lot of people. (The Tempters and Integrators may argue this point at length.) Depending on your Storyteller, you may even be able to line up a sucker punch (metaphorical or literal, keeping the above in mind) that can be felt on the national or global scale - but that's the sort of thing you generally aim for as the end-point of a game. Boogaleeboo posted:They can't even say there are meaningfully opposing the God-Machine on the small scale to any real degree, because they don't know what any of it really means in the end. I dunno, "obliterate or subvert all Infrastructure in an area, destroying the God-Machine's ability to function properly in the locale" seems like a pretty good way of defining opposition to me 
Daeren fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Aug 31, 2015 |
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2015 20:08
|
|
