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Shockeh posted:I love that in my mental WoD, there is now 'Breach Studios - Cinema in Plain Sight' run by entirely genuine people making bad send-up movies, and actually owned by a few canny Kindred who offer 'cover up services' in the form of making a film. Running a Demon: the Descent game in Los Angeles and this is a fantastic plot seed for a future session. Especially if the God-Machine gets involved and it starts becoming a "hungry" industry.
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Sep 7, 2015 21:33
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Vitamin P posted:I've been enjoying calling David Cameron's political team the Camarilla and know that it is a vampire thing. In case some better nerd puts egg on my face, the Camarilla are right wing bastards right? The Camarilla are a secret society of elitist bloodsucking fiends who have their fingers in virtually every pie in society and exist to protect their inhuman, monstrous membership from the masses of humanity. So yeah, Cameron.
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Sep 7, 2015 21:56
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Not as pale, though.
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Sep 7, 2015 22:14
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Pope Guilty posted:The Camarilla are a secret society of elitist bloodsucking fiends who have their fingers in virtually every pie in society and exist to protect their inhuman, monstrous membership from the masses of humanity. You're my kind of nerd, thanks.
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Sep 7, 2015 22:27
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Except that the Camarilla has to resort to an elaborate Masquerade to hide how they are sucking humanity dry, while politicians have been super transparent about it recently (and still get voted into office).
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Sep 7, 2015 22:28
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To me, the prime threat to Masquerade is not that Joe Smith just filmed a Kindred throwing a car into a shadow man across the street, but rather how Vampires and Hunters could and would deliberately break it. Picture this. You're Catiff. Your would say that your Unlife is hell, except in hell the assholes get punished alongside you. So gently caress'em. You're bringing their world to its knees. Walk into the Times and show'em what you got. Go onto live TV during New Years Eve and eat the presenter or shoot yourself and heal. Walk into the lap of a prestigious biologist or surgeon and offer yourself up as a lab rat. Live TV, especially if its multiple broadcasters, would be pretty hard to fake. Go big enough and no Illuminati patch job is going to be able to work fast enough. This also works if a few hunters get their hands on staked vamp and turn him over. What better way to fight back than with an army of 6 billion rather than the 4 dudes you previously had?
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Sep 8, 2015 03:46
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Pope Guilty posted:Now apply that logic to vampire poo poo and a population that makes your parents who can barely work a web browser look like software engineers... Just a funny aside here: I worked in computer literacy and one of the interesting things is that for the most part, competence sort of peaks among people who came of age around the time Windows became ubiquitous because the experienced the transition to omnipresent GUIs and have some idea that a computer is not literally doing the thing the pictures of its processes are doing. Earlier than that you have people who learned just enough to do their jobs, if anything (ex: I have a relative who can program mainframes in Job Control Language but not maintain a Windows 7 machine). Later than that and you have the face-value problem where kids learn the most efficient way of performing individual tasks through a UI but lack any sort of general knowledge. Old and young alike don't know how to manually enter URLs, for example. I can easily imagine an enterprising Nos spewing free apps that monkey with your camera whenever you attach certain keywords or various types of metadata, perhaps tuned to the local political situation so that videos around disputed areas and Elysiums either look lousy or never get uploaded (except to the Nos' servers). When one gets exposed for funny permissions, s/he just kicks another one out.
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Sep 8, 2015 06:03
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Hipster Occultist posted:To me, the prime threat to Masquerade is not that Joe Smith just filmed a Kindred throwing a car into a shadow man across the street, but rather how Vampires and Hunters could and would deliberately break it. Keep in mind that 20 years ago when the San Jose Mercury News published a series of articles describing how the CIA smuggled cocaine into black neighborhoods, based on statements from the real live CIA agents responsible, they were eventually forced to retract the story and disavow the people responsible. How much prodding did the rest of the national media need to wheel on the paper like a pack of rabid animals? Outside of black communities, radicals, and cranks nobody took it seriously. Keep in mind this is a plausible thing that a lot of people were already historically disposed to believe. It was based on insider statements and it was a huge scoop. But in the end it was retracted and disavowed. All without the use of any supernatural power - that we know of (heh). E: Of course its even sillier to imagine such a conscientious vampire surviving more than a few weeks without going crazy, dying, or being convinced that its not all so bad after all. DOCTOR ZIMBARDO fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Sep 8, 2015 |
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Sep 8, 2015 15:24
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The difference between the two being that one example is a selection of articles in one newspaper in which statements can be retracted, whereas the other involves a ideally multiple live broadcasts. And the Vampire in my example wasn't conscientious, far from it. When they aren't killed outright as a matter of course or simple superstition, Catiff are treated are literal garbage and blamed for anything that goes wrong by vampires of greater status, which is pretty much all of them. Even if we take Catiff out of the equation, its not hard to imagine a young, sireless vampire making similar mistakes. Hell, that's even ignoring the Sabbat who outright state as a part of their official creed that they deny the masquerade and revel in their power. How they haven't hosed things up for all vampires is a mystery in and of itself.
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Sep 8, 2015 21:30
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Okay, the US in 1990. Which state should I set my tier 1 hunter game in? Im thinking it needs to be somewhat rural aswell as having a metropolitan. Virginia maybe? Louisiana?
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Sep 8, 2015 23:51
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DJ Dizzy posted:Okay, the US in 1990. Which state should I set my tier 1 hunter game in? Im thinking it needs to be somewhat rural aswell as having a metropolitan. Virginia maybe? Louisiana? If you want someplace colder, the Minnesota/Dakota sprawl has a ton of urban areas separated by long stretches of rural hell.
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Sep 8, 2015 23:57
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DJ Dizzy posted:Okay, the US in 1990. Which state should I set my tier 1 hunter game in? Im thinking it needs to be somewhat rural aswell as having a metropolitan. Virginia maybe? Louisiana? Maine, to go full Stephen King.
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Sep 9, 2015 00:00
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DJ Dizzy posted:Okay, the US in 1990. Which state should I set my tier 1 hunter game in? Im thinking it needs to be somewhat rural aswell as having a metropolitan. Virginia maybe? Louisiana? Oregon or Washington? Lots of rural areas, with weird associated supernatural lore. You can easily crib off classic early X-files monster of the week episodes. It's a good nexus of early 90s trends with grunge and technology blowing up big in Seattle, while Portland was a considerably less hip small city in a state suffering from the decline of its previously economically vital logging industry that devastated blue-collar employment prospects. You get a pretty good slice of recognizable early to mid-90s cultural touchstones in an area with large swathes of uninhabited areas to populate with bizarre supernatural poo poo. Disadvantages are that the area hasn't been heavily populated for that long historically so you've maybe got less to work with in terms of old ghosts (non-native ones anyway), and you're well away from the epicenters of the early-90's urban violence/crack-epidemic so if that was an element you wanted it might be a problem (heroin was more the thing in the PNW).
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Sep 9, 2015 00:19
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DJ Dizzy posted:Okay, the US in 1990. Which state should I set my tier 1 hunter game in? Im thinking it needs to be somewhat rural aswell as having a metropolitan. Virginia maybe? Louisiana? Alaska. Sparsely populated, plenty of natural hazards, gets really loving dark in the winter, and contains a hidden horror that will soon run for Republican Vice-President.
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Sep 9, 2015 00:23
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SunAndSpring posted:Alaska. Sparsely populated, plenty of natural hazards, gets really loving dark in the winter, and contains a hidden horror that will soon run for Republican Vice-President. She was 26 in 1990 and wouldnt be elected for anything for another two years 
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Sep 9, 2015 00:29
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Do you want just one metropole to focus on? Because California gets rural very quickly depending on which way you travel, and 25 years ago it was much less developed.
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Sep 9, 2015 00:30
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Isnt California mostly desert? Let's narrow it down to one of the original 13 colonies.LGD posted:She was 26 in 1990 and wouldnt be elected for anything for another two years It's a G-M plot.
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Sep 9, 2015 01:28
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DJ Dizzy posted:Isnt California mostly desert? Let's narrow it down to one of the original 13 colonies. Uh, no. Central California is a grass desert, but it's only literal in the south.
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Sep 9, 2015 01:33
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In what state is Nightvale located?
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Sep 9, 2015 01:41
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MonsieurChoc posted:In what state is Nightvale located? Calisota, west of Springfield and southeast of Duckburg.
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Sep 9, 2015 01:48
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MonsieurChoc posted:In what state is Nightvale located? It's sandwiched right between Ogdenville and North Haverbrook. Serious talk, though, whatever the state, I'm pro-fictional city. Real cities are fine too, but one idea I never got to explore because the campaign fizzled was a Mage game set in a nonexistent metropolis in New Jersey. Visiting out-of-towners in the know tended to be very businesslike, get in, do thing, get out, don't get cozy. Because there's no such city as Navidson, NJ, and they knew it just as well as we do.
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Sep 9, 2015 02:04
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DJ Dizzy posted:Okay, the US in 1990. Which state should I set my tier 1 hunter game in? Im thinking it needs to be somewhat rural aswell as having a metropolitan. Virginia maybe? Louisiana? San Bernardino County, California
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Sep 9, 2015 03:12
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I Am Just a Box posted:It's sandwiched right between Ogdenville and North Haverbrook. That's a good name for such a place.
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Sep 9, 2015 03:49
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MonsieurChoc posted:In what state is Nightvale located? Hohoq, also known as Ar.
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Sep 9, 2015 04:03
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Kurieg posted:If you want someplace colder, the Minnesota/Dakota sprawl has a ton of urban areas separated by long stretches of rural hell. Do this. The North Midwest / Great Lakes don't get nearly enough rpg love.
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Sep 9, 2015 04:19
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Kinda off topic, but I once invented a city in a comic thing on Rpg.net that could easily be reworked into the nWoD. It was basically a cross between Gotham City, El Amarja, Interzone and Paradigm City. Night City is located in an archipelago (given the equally original name of the Midnight Archipelago) smack dab between China and Japan, originally used by smugglers and pirates until it was turned into a British Colony in the late 18th Century. Of dubious legal status in mdoern days, it's used by criminal enterprises, ruthless corporations and variosu supernatural groups as a free space. The Masquerade is an open secret (moreso than the rest of the nWoD), with the major criminal syndicates being deep in the occult game: the vampire mafia, the werewolf street gangs, the Triads are led by mages, the yakuza have all kind of weird tech and the Tongs have cornered the market on Supernatural Protection (pay your protection money and we're gonna punch the ghost out of your shop). A Frankenstein named Frank is the rep of the Dockworkers Union (for some reason, the Wasteland doesn't work on these islands, although the rest of Promethean drawbacks still apply). Outside of Night City, the rest of the island is msotly extremely dangerous swamplands, with mysterious unexplored ruins scatterred throughout. There used to be a grand civilization here, but soemthing happened millenias ago that destroyed it. What is left of the locals live in quiet fishing villages scatterred along the Coast, and are deathyl afraid of whatever's hidden deep in those ruins. The few who tried finding out died, went crazy, or most likely did both in spectacular fashion.There's government, but all the posts above Mayor are secret. People are randomly selected for the Governor's election, vote in secret and no one knows who won. The currency is the british pound. Anyway. One day I'll try and run a crazy crossover game in Night City. I've got to finish my current games first, and then run that Wyld West game I've been planning. Still, one day.
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Sep 9, 2015 04:20
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I misread Paradigm City as Paragon City, which might be just as good but in an entirely different way.
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Sep 9, 2015 04:48
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Hipster Occultist posted:Hell, that's even ignoring the Sabbat who outright state as a part of their official creed that they deny the masquerade and revel in their power. How they haven't hosed things up for all vampires is a mystery in and of itself. That would be the work of the Sabbat elders, who routinely kill off the chucklefucks in the packs with suicide missions, internecine strife and outright murder. The Elders are all for ruling openly - but they also aren't stupid enough to think that they could actually do so in the modern age. No doubt they're looking at peak oil and all the other economic collapses we're supposed to see over the next century and licking their lips with eager anticipation of when the blood-reign can begin again.
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Sep 9, 2015 05:53
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Punting posted:Do this. The North Midwest / Great Lakes don't get nearly enough rpg love. Well, I mean, McWOD does turn North Dakota into the epicenter of the gigantic hole in reality that releases demons into the world.
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Sep 9, 2015 06:05
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How long does it take for anyone to notice?
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Sep 9, 2015 06:39
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DJ Dizzy posted:Okay, the US in 1990. Which state should I set my tier 1 hunter game in? Im thinking it needs to be somewhat rural aswell as having a metropolitan. Virginia maybe? Louisiana? Louisiana is definitely rural but has no such thing as a metropolis. However, there is plenty of built-in culture and plot-hooks, especially in New Orleans. Speaking of, that is a city that is a major port, surrounded by sparsely populated wetlands, tons of folk tales from various cultures, religions and mish-mashes thereof (native american, french, spanish, haitian, catholic, voodoo, etc.). The city itself would serve as decent spot for supernaturals to hide in plain sight because the place is just weird, especially at night.
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Sep 9, 2015 06:56
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I dunno, isn't NOLA a hell of a metropolis? Place has over a million people with like five different languages and poo poo. It's not the biggest but it qualifies.
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Sep 9, 2015 09:25
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Loomer posted:I dunno, isn't NOLA a hell of a metropolis? Place has over a million people with like five different languages and poo poo. It's not the biggest but it qualifies. It has never had a million people. The highest it has been was 484k. It is definitely a sizeable city, but but not what someone would typically think of as a metropolis. I'm biased (live an hour away), but I think it's a wonderful place for a hunter game. Lots of superstitions, a populace that is accepting of "unique" individuals (allowing supernaturals to blend in easier), a varied environment (swamp, woods, river, ocean), a major port, international airport, and heavy in tourism. The tourism angle could be useful in a campaign because people come down not just to tour the city but also for huge events like the Super Bowl, NCAA tournament, and many, many musical acts. Could be used to put a kind of timer or end point for the players to fix something before it gets public.
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Sep 9, 2015 13:56
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Fair enough. Living in bumfuck nowhere does warp one's perception of what constitutes a major city. The million figure is, it turns out, for the greater NOLA metropolitan area.
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Sep 9, 2015 14:15
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Mors Rattus posted:How long does it take for anyone to notice? The hole's detect effects reach out past Chicago, so pretty quick. Still, as an ex-Bismarck resident, I found it amusing that they put it there. The real reason for it is probably because North Dakota is the geographic center of North America(it's why we had all those nukes), but still.
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Sep 9, 2015 14:35
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Loomer posted:Fair enough. Living in bumfuck nowhere does warp one's perception of what constitutes a major city. No problem.  I'm normally arguing the opposite side as a sports fan in a relatively small media market.  But, yeah, the greater NOLA metropolitan area is kind of dumb because it covers seven parishes (or counties as they're called in every other state). That seems way out of scope of the city. NOLA is still a great, great place for pretty much any occult-based game. Or at least basing a make-believe town off it or getting inspiration from it. It's a very unique city.
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Sep 9, 2015 14:38
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Another interesting feature of NOLA is that a big chunk of the people there aren't part of the population. Tourism is a big loving deal there and 9.28 million people visited the city in 2014. That's a lot of potential story hooks coming and going, and it's helpful to the Masquerade and what not since if you feed on someone and manage to not kill them, they'll probably be gone next week and you'll get a bunch of fresh meat on a regular cycle. EDIT: Also you get to play New Orleans jazz during the game to set the mood, so that's a plus.
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Sep 9, 2015 14:53
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MonsieurChoc posted:Anyway. One day I'll try and run a crazy crossover game in Night City.
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Sep 9, 2015 14:56
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Gilok posted:EDIT: Also you get to play New Orleans jazz during the game to set the mood, so that's a plus. Or some Trombone Shorty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwYAeUpH1NM
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Sep 9, 2015 15:00
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Another question: How to I get a tier 1 hunter cell to stick together?
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Sep 9, 2015 15:40
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