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I am gonna be That Guy and talk about in my game. In my Demon game, the party's first 'season' was spent tracing one giant Infrastructural plan that involved the careful tracking, monitoring and raising of psychics in order to harvest their blood for use in cloning a sort of perfect psychic creation, which required an army of 'iterations' that, as a side effect, produced a bunch of monsters and people with horrible brain alterations. The party never did find out what this was all needed for, beyond 'the final iteration is needed for some project', but I feel that the fact that they stopped this from being doable again for a fairly long time was a big win, especially since they saved the clones and kept more giant cyborg raccoon bears from being made. (And now have to find a neurosurgeon with enough magical expertise to help fix the clones, but still.) The God-Machine, at least as far as my reading informs me, doesn't feel anger over being thwarted - but once it's thwarted, most of its projects can't be immediately restarted due to the sensitivity of the conditions involved. (This is where the whole numerology-in-newspapers thing comes in - that's there to say that such a confluence of events is needed that if you manage to foil a plan, it's likely to be centuries before it can be started again. To say nothing of the fact that the God-Machine will often decide to shelve operations for that long anyway if you get to be a big enough problem because it's easier to wait for your death of old age.)
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Aug 31, 2015 20:42
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See, I don't think one should 'fight' the God-Machine at all; that finding out this guy who works at the grocery store or this cat who keeps hanging out around your place 'works' for It should be a major reveal or nagging paranoia. People who work for the God Machine don't have a full picture of what they're doing and should have human motivations for what they do, with angels pulling the strings at the edges of the story. Even then, angels should ultimately have human-recognizable motivations for doing what they do, and angels don't really have the whole picture either. What I want from my Demon game is a world where 'The God Machine' is just short hand for 'The Conspiracy' or 'The Syndicate' or whatever, except no matter how hard you try you can never look behind the curtain and see what's going on. It's a the X-Files perpetually stuck in the 1st/2nd seasons and you never really figure out what the motivation for any of it is, but you still meet characters who think they get it and keep getting very upset when you put pressure on them to tell you the truth. That's what I think fighting the God Machine should be like; it's like being Mulder in the(early) X-Files; you think you get but no, you really don't. Yet you still manage to create setbacks and hardships for the enemy, and you do save human lives in the pursuit of justice against this omnipresent conspiratorial power. A machine cultist who works for a music company wants to keep his job and his fame and his power, and the person (or angel) who put him there fabricates a close-enough story about the big picture that the he's terrified of breaking his established rules. Demons should be uncovering that kind of poo poo all the time, with actual assaults on locational Infrastructure being a pretty big deal. At least, I guess that's my vision of it.
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Sep 1, 2015 01:37
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This is something of a problem for Demon, where you are in fact a former angel who knows about large Infrastructure projects (at least, the ones they were part of) and can have a motive that is 'blow them the hell up.' The game needs to support characters being able to advance that agenda as much as the ones who want to find the truth or live it up. (Or the poor souls who are trying to find a way to make their god less horrible so they can go home without being reformatted.)
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Sep 1, 2015 01:43
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Mechanically, how well do the bloodlines from pre-2.0 translate into vamp 2.0? Are there any major obstacles I should keep in mind?
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Sep 1, 2015 01:50
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Trollhawke posted:Mechanically, how well do the bloodlines from pre-2.0 translate into vamp 2.0? Are there any major obstacles I should keep in mind?
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Sep 1, 2015 01:59
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I'm going to point out that, for the record, on at least several occasions the Cold War could have been ended* in a few heart-stopping moments by a single perseon crazy enough and inclined to do so. People like to pretend these highly advanced, redundant, failsafe systems today are all invincible, but sometimes the fate of the world and the course of its entire history do actually come down to one person, or a few of them. A single overloaded computer terminal, or a faulty switch in the power grid at just the wrong time, could end everything at a moment's notice. Gavrilo Principe, Stanislav Petrov, or Cleitus the Black are historical examples of individuals who didn't possess any outrageous power but were in the right place at the right time, just once, and completely changed history. Armageddon is a totally reasonable end-state for a Demon campaign.
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Sep 1, 2015 03:30
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:I'm going to point out that, for the record, on at least several occasions the Cold War could have been ended* in a few heart-stopping moments by a single perseon crazy enough and inclined to do so. Or the PCs successfully averting it or making it go from "End Of The World As We Know It" to "This Is A Huge But Manageable Problem", as is the case (so far) in the Demon game I'm in. If it takes the right individual(s) in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time to set off Armageddon, all you need to do is screw that timing up. And then keep doing that to all the backup plans that crop up. And deal with an international cult that wants you dead for loving with their genocide timetable. And run like Hell when you finally poo poo in the wrong bowl of Cheerios and destroy Infrastructure so vital to a plan that its fail state completes a secondary ring of Infrastructure that calls down an archangel to obliterate whoever was just dumb/crazy enough to blow up a national monument to foil aforementioned doomsday cult's schemes, requiring the monument be erased from all former, present, and potential timelines in order to save us from getting owned so hard it'd make a colony drop look like a restrained response. Demon is great for quiet espionage but can still work really well when your ST is nuts and the stakes are "literally everything", is what I'm saying.
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Sep 1, 2015 03:54
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Jesus Daeren where do you find your groups? 
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Sep 1, 2015 04:06
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Luminous Obscurity posted:Jesus Daeren where do you find your groups? It's the same group, more or less, orbiting around a few of us in particular. Rubix Squid, a lurker in here, is usually who I'm talking about when I mention my ST friend, while a handful more have SA accounts (Obligatum VII being the only one who posts in here semi-regularly). Rubix Squid is a funhaver to end all funhavers, and this shows in her games. They're very tonally different from what I run (aside from when I use comedic relief) but anyone who can tell me in good faith that it's incorrect to play games that: - have federal agents tazing demons from the Inferno for "not speaking American" - have werewolves that light themselves on fire and elbow drop psychics from six stories up - end a year-long storyline with a car chase down the wrong side of the freeway at 130 miles an hour between an airbrushed panel van and a 1964 Corvette that is also an angel - always and forever demonstrate why mages should never be trusted with any responsibility more serious than mowing the lawn unless you want to come back to see them going mad with power - try to figure out what the gently caress Changeling Pledges would do to change legal codes in a post-Masquerade world - actually sketch out 30 years of alternate history/future for a near-future post-Masquerade setting that actually tries to strike a balance between logical events and handwaves for the sake of playability - still maintain a level of dramatic tension, somehow, when Rubix Squid actually wants to play straight for a bit Is someone who has bad opinions.
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Sep 1, 2015 04:23
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IIRC most of the scenarios in the Seattle setting book for Demon have you getting one hell of a bargaining chip over the God-Machine. My favorite was the one where you break into a vault filled with countless alternate timelines where Earth would've died off (nuclear war, meteor strikes, some dumbass installs the air scrubbers to a germ warfare labs incorrectly) contained in little bubbles, and if you break them they release whatever they had in them. So you can get into a big pissing match with the G-M, who would rather not have to rebuild a lot of its infrastructure because that's just a pain in the rear end even if it could probably do it, and maybe get a truce out of it if you agree to disarm yourself.
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Sep 1, 2015 04:36
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SunAndSpring posted:IIRC most of the scenarios in the Seattle setting book for Demon have you getting one hell of a bargaining chip over the God-Machine. My favorite was the one where you break into a vault filled with countless alternate timelines where Earth would've died off (nuclear war, meteor strikes, some dumbass installs the air scrubbers to a germ warfare labs incorrectly) contained in little bubbles, and if you break them they release whatever they had in them. So you can get into a big pissing match with the G-M, who would rather not have to rebuild a lot of its infrastructure because that's just a pain in the rear end even if it could probably do it, and maybe get a truce out of it if you agree to disarm yourself.
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Sep 1, 2015 10:12
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Zereth posted:This of course assumes that the God Machine is capable of being direct enough to negotiate with people, and for that matter that it actually has motivations as we understand them. Or at all. Which does not seem like a safe assumption to make to me. Angels are capable of negotiating, and we can assume that in such a situation the God-Machine would activate a "negotiator angel" it keeps in storage for that exact purpose.
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Sep 1, 2015 11:28
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Effectronica posted:Angels are capable of negotiating, and we can assume that in such a situation the God-Machine would activate a "negotiator angel" it keeps in storage for that exact purpose. You can, but you can also assume that the God-Machine completely ignores them and moves on to a Plan B of generating a series of perfect Counter-Earths to release against the stolen Earths at a moment's notice to negate their presence. Just to make it seem that more messed up and distant that it would institute a ridiculously arcane reality altering act of cosmic creation when simply talking to some random assholes could resolve things even faster and safer. If you want to play the God-Machine as more of an active force with some level of intent and perception, you can. And if you want it to be more Machine than God, you can make it something so totally alien to sentient thought that there is not and never will be any meeting of the minds or truly understanding it's operations. Demon gives you options to go down that road however you like.
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Sep 1, 2015 12:08
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Those are basically the same risks facing any would-be hostage taker though.
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Sep 1, 2015 15:11
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Daeren posted:It's the same group, more or less, orbiting around a few of us in particular. Rubix Squid, a lurker in here, is usually who I'm talking about when I mention my ST friend, while a handful more have SA accounts (Obligatum VII being the only one who posts in here semi-regularly). This is someone who has the Best Opinions and I am totally jealous.
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Sep 1, 2015 21:17
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It is incorrect to taze demons from the Inferno for not speaking American. You taze them because they were clearly reaching for a gun. That is like law enforcement 101.
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Sep 1, 2015 22:05
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Wow this incarnation of greed and gluttony isn't the least bit American, what's it doing here, I'm getting suspicious
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Sep 1, 2015 22:07
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My favourite setting I've always raved about was Gehenna2k, where Ravanna does get murdered, the Ravnos get turned into a Bloodline (then become Salubri MkII as everyone takes the excuse to hunt 90% of them into oblivion, and the rest hide in the Sabbat) and the rest of Gehenna just... Doesn't happen. Anthelios vanishes, the Assamites abandon the Sabbat wholesale and are now split between Ur-Shulgi's Loyalists and Al-Ashrad's Camarilla Schismatics, and so on, and so forth. It's a fun setting in 2015 to run the Masquerade, I might effort post the tonnes I wrote on it as a thought experiment when I'm not sat on a train.
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Sep 2, 2015 08:31
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I prefer one in which Gehenna is a slow crawl rather than a discrete event. In the old game I was running set in 1920s St. Louis, Gehenna actually began a couple of centuries ago with some of the events of the Transylvania Chronicles/Giovanni Saga. Vampires rule on time spans impossible for the human mind to comprehend, when you get down to it. To a creature tens of thousands of years old, a few decades here and there in the scope of things is a blink of an eye, so the prophecies of Gehenna speak of it with immediacy not because it will all come at once, but because it looks that way to the ancient beasts. This is also a fun time to remind everyone that, according to one of the older short story collections, vampires have been around since Peking Man at least. Obviously that isn't proper canon, but it's amusing to consider that if it is, Caine is potentially over a million years old and actually a completely different species than modern man.
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Sep 2, 2015 08:39
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Loomer posted:I prefer one in which Gehenna is a slow crawl rather than a discrete event. In the old game I was running set in 1920s St. Louis, Gehenna actually began a couple of centuries ago with some of the events of the Transylvania Chronicles/Giovanni Saga.. Oh, absolutely. That's to my mind the Sabbat doesn't entirely implode. "We now exist in the Age of Gehenna!" It's just so slow moving only something with the timeframe of a Cainite can appreciate it. Of course, this isn't enough for the majority of Sabbat packs (as most are under a century old) so it sparks the fourth Sabbat Civil War.
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Sep 3, 2015 08:15
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The big thing about modern Masquerade is that I find it harder and harder to believe that the Masquerade could be effectively maintained in the modern world. Ubiquitous cameras, a plethora of video sharing sites, and a population able to talk to each other in ways they never could before? The Camarilla's got to be in full-on panic mode. It's only a matter of time.
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Sep 3, 2015 11:06
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That's why they're going the blood-magic in the newer stuff to try and compensate for it. If vampires can create a special magic version of facebook posting, they can probably do the same for everything else. I find it a bit silly myself, but gently caress it. The alternative is to just assume the Technocracy is real and keeping it hush hush to further their agenda of 'no supernaturals here, no sir-ee bob.' Like that great moment in Time of Judgement or whatever book it was where like six different splats all turn up in one media office at once to do damage control over a major incident, awkwardly nod at each other when they realize they're all there to do the same thing, do it, and quietly leave.
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Sep 3, 2015 11:26
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Pope Guilty posted:The big thing about modern Masquerade is that I find it harder and harder to believe that the Masquerade could be effectively maintained in the modern world. Ubiquitous cameras, a plethora of video sharing sites, and a population able to talk to each other in ways they never could before? The Camarilla's got to be in full-on panic mode. It's only a matter of time. Simply put, they are. The Camarilla gets more & more draconian in trying to maintain the Masquerade, and breaches become less common (because the punishments are so severe) but higher impact (because of the ubiquitousness of phone cameras) although oddly, the Lasombra benefit hugely when it comes to clean-up, having no reflections. I tried writing in that the Technocracy weirdly becomes complicit in the Masquerade, which helps a lot. If Humanity believes in the Supernatural, then the other Mage Factions gain power as a consequence; It's in their best interests for humanity to believe in a purely scientific world, so it's in their best interests to repress information that furthers belief. They realise that basically Ascension isn't a quick thing; They need to 'hold down' the top spot for a long time to win the war.
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Sep 3, 2015 14:19
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Loomer posted:That's why they're going the blood-magic in the newer stuff to try and compensate for it. If vampires can create a special magic version of facebook posting, they can probably do the same for everything else. I find it a bit silly myself, but gently caress it. The alternative is to just assume the Technocracy is real and keeping it hush hush to further their agenda of 'no supernaturals here, no sir-ee bob.' I take the new stuff to just be the logical extension of the Path of Technomancy being the future of the Tremere. The Technomancers are some of the youngest, most innovative gently caress-you-vampire-dad Tremere around, and in the current culture of course what they're going to do with that is make iPhone apps.
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Sep 3, 2015 14:26
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Pope Guilty posted:I take the new stuff to just be the logical extension of the Path of Technomancy being the future of the Tremere. The Technomancers are some of the youngest, most innovative gently caress-you-vampire-dad Tremere around, and in the current culture of course what they're going to do with that is make iPhone apps. Dammit that sounds at once hilarious, awesome, and dumb.
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Sep 3, 2015 14:55
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Yawgmoth posted:"I rub my iPhone on this blood and it brings up their FB/twitter/instagram pages along with their generation and clan!" Which makes it OWOD as gently caress.
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Sep 3, 2015 15:16
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Loomer posted:This is also a fun time to remind everyone that, according to one of the older short story collections, vampires have been around since Peking Man at least. Obviously that isn't proper canon, but it's amusing to consider that if it is, Caine is potentially over a million years old and actually a completely different species than modern man. For a long time I've wanted to run The 13th Warrior in NWoD, with the players as a small band of mundane Norse warriors and miscellany versus a tribe of pre-human homonid ghouls ruled by Gangrel of the same species.
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Sep 3, 2015 15:45
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I like to think of the Masquerade as partially self-enforcing. I know this isn't an entirely logical view of the situation but my reasoning goes like this: How many murders are there in your greater metro area? How many aggravated assaults? Drive bys? Why are there not more videos of those in the public eye? There are some, of course; and a very disturbed kind of person trades in gross stuff too for sure. Is it because people wouldn't consume it? Is it because you can't post it on YouTube? Is it because people aren't taking those kinds of videos? I think there probably are more people with an awareness of the supernatural, but they're all people with the faith and weirdness to go to the right places online and talk to the right people. You can't post a video of some guy ripping somebody's throat out of youtube. I see a smart, informed hunter class developing in response to modern civilian surveillance but I don't see any kind of big outing of the supernatural to the general public.
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Sep 3, 2015 17:28
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Mendrian posted:I like to think of the Masquerade as partially self-enforcing. I know this isn't an entirely logical view of the situation but my reasoning goes like this: You can sure as poo poo catch a video of a dude outrunning a jeep and put that on YouTube, though. Or a dude turning into a bat, or growing extra arms, or bench-pressing a dumpster.
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Sep 3, 2015 19:51
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Daeren posted:You can sure as poo poo catch a video of a dude outrunning a jeep and put that on YouTube, though. Or a dude turning into a bat, or growing extra arms, or bench-pressing a dumpster. Yeah, but who the gently caress is going to believe it? Real people can't do that poo poo, and any kid with a laptop, pirated video editing software, and too much Red Bull could make a convincing fake (especially in the oWoD, where realistic depictions of technology are about as rare as realistic depictions of magic). poo poo, there are people who still don't buy the moon landing, but do buy the notion that Planned Parenthood are harvesting infant organs for the black market because of 'video evidence'. Discrediting and distracting from actual videos of vampires and other poo poo is probably not that hard. Cabbit fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Sep 3, 2015 |
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Sep 3, 2015 20:30
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Hunter video on hunting mages! And this is why the masquerade holds.
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Sep 3, 2015 23:27
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Yawgmoth posted:Hunter video on hunting mages! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe0fK1znV9U
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Sep 3, 2015 23:39
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Typical Changeling.
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Sep 4, 2015 00:21
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Yawgmoth posted:Hunter video on hunting mages! Jesus that ending bit with the woman in a bathing suit playing a "corpse" is really creepy.
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Sep 4, 2015 01:31
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I think I'm going to be running old werewolf soon. It's dumb and goofy and I love it
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Sep 4, 2015 14:41
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So long as you play up the Saturday Morning Cartooniness and downplay the weird rapey bits and racism, it's a good one to run. oWerewolf plays at its best when it's Captain Planet meets Metalocalypse.
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Sep 5, 2015 11:04
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In planning my Wyld West game, I've started creating new Broken Ones. For those who've never read Wyld West, Broken Ones are people or animals that got merged with one or more spirit during a Wyld Storm. They've got weird powers and personalities, and also all have a weakness that when exploited gives them a +2 difficulty to every actions. So, fun stuff! So anyway, here's what I came up with: Dead Can Dance: An undertaker that got merged with a Wyrm spirit. He can infuse corpses with his energy, controllign them like puppets. His weakness is music, as he can't stop himself or his puppets from dancing to the beat. His eyes are wyrmfire. Jethro Tull aka Ironhand: Hopefully a long-standing antagonist, fi my players don't brutally kill him the first time they meet. A failed inventor that became a bandit and got merged with a Pattern Spider. He can create fantastical machine by putting Weaver-Spirit inside them, he usually accompanied by five metal automatons dressed like cowboys. His weakness is magnets: his movements and that of his machines are all slowed by fighting the magnetic forces. His nickname come from his entire left arm now being made of iron. Django Rhinehart: A german bounty-hunter that got merged with a Wyld-Spirit and now hunts down those he think have done harm to Nature. Thanks to his new single-minded nature, can easily manipulated (that's how he'll find himself fighting the PCs). Can control the trajectories of objects, like bullets. Wealness is gold or money, probably a leftover from his bounty-hunter days. Yes, the naming-scheme is very Jojo-inspired.
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Sep 5, 2015 15:34
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MonsieurChoc posted:In planning my Wyld West game, I've started creating new Broken Ones. For those who've never read Wyld West, Broken Ones are people or animals that got merged with one or more spirit during a Wyld Storm.
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Sep 5, 2015 15:51
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Alek Reeves and Kano Winters, a Russian fur trapper and his Inuit pal a la The Lone Ranger. They seek rocks, very special rocks, that will let them keep back the forces of the Wyrm and hunt any Black Spiral Dancers that get in their way. They will never stop on their quest to rock...s. To get rocks
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Sep 5, 2015 16:10
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pkfan2004 posted:Alek Reeves and Kano Winters, a Russian fur trapper and his Inuit pal a la The Lone Ranger. They seek rocks, very special rocks, that will let them keep back the forces of the Wyrm and hunt any Black Spiral Dancers that get in their way. They will never stop on their quest to rock...s. To get rocks Don't mind if I do!
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Sep 5, 2015 16:48
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