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Mors Rattus posted:To say nothing of the fact that it's stupid to posit that Tokyo had no wizards until 500 years ago and then not even discuss why even slightly. It doesn't say that, though; it says that the earliest records the Awakened have go back 500 years. Given that, prior to Tokugawa Ieyasu making it his capital, Edo was a backwater fishing village, it's not terribly surprising that there wasn't an appreciable mage presence there earlier. It also mentions later that a lot of the older records are lost. So "no wizards until 500 years ago" is really more "we can only reliably say mages have been here for 500 years."
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May 19, 2016 17:02
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I like the Nakatomi history-theology-politics-legacy plot, it is what I'm looking for in Mage  My big concern with running Tokyo as-is would be that it's just kind of a really huge city and that gives me stage fright as an ST in terms of things to present to players. I'm running a game in LA soon and that's worrying me. I guess one thing to do would be "bracketing" the setting by focusing the action on a handful of iconic locations, and getting a 1-2 sentence description of each neighborhood/district as a reference if a scene goes there.
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May 19, 2016 17:16
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That's good procedure for RPGs in general. I made a whole city for my D&D campaign but the players have spent most of their time in two of it's twenty neighborhoods.
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May 19, 2016 17:30
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Kellsterik posted:I like the Nakatomi history-theology-politics-legacy plot, it is what I'm looking for in Mage Yeah, and don't feel the need to break out every real life neighborhood. It turns out when you boil a city down to a handful of locations with one-sentence descriptions, there are only so many original locations to go around. Granted, Tokyo has more than most, since I can think of at least a dozen unique areas off the top of my head without running into, "This is a place where people live, not much happens" territory but I think it's a good idea all the same.
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May 19, 2016 17:45
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Mendrian posted:Yeah, and don't feel the need to break out every real life neighborhood. It turns out when you boil a city down to a handful of locations with one-sentence descriptions, there are only so many original locations to go around. Granted, Tokyo has more than most, since I can think of at least a dozen unique areas off the top of my head without running into, "This is a place where people live, not much happens" territory but I think it's a good idea all the same. It's also a good way to have the players help expanding the world, too. If they are looking for a place to eat (and you don't already have somewhere in mind), ask them what kind of food they are looking for and yay, a place that serves it now exists!
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May 19, 2016 17:49
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hangedman1984 posted:Missed that part, more info? Commissar Budgie posted:elaborate please Other people summarised while I was out but it didn't mention that A: The monster snuck into her room and was stated to be planning "god knows what", and when I think of abusers sneaking into teenager's bedrooms I always think super wholesome thoughts, and B: She killed the beast, after chasing it into it's nightmare whereupon it turned into a monster. For some people, this was proof she was a psychopath, because the legal definition of reasonable defence specifically excludes pursuit beyond X Y Z boundary, whereas the more logical take was "She exited her room and entered a hellish nightmarescape and saw the person who'd just snuck into her room turn into cthlhu, and she killed it? Holy poo poo this girl is awesome". Like, it's probably also worth mentioning that Beasts are pretty mechanically powerful too, so not only is this a girl brave enough to try and fight a terrifying nightmare beast but she's also hardcore enough to actually win. EDIT: Oh man I forgot the entire lovely tumblr thing where people said that "If you don't want to be killed by surprisingly metal cheerleaders maybe don't sneak into their rooms at night and attack them" and then got accused of victim blaming. spectralent fucked around with this message at 18:06 on May 19, 2016 |
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May 19, 2016 18:03
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How are Beasts going to be taught the primordial lesson of not stalking teenage girls if they don't get murdered in their own homes now and then?
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May 19, 2016 18:35
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Kibner posted:It's also a good way to have the players help expanding the world, too. If they are looking for a place to eat (and you don't already have somewhere in mind), ask them what kind of food they are looking for and yay, a place that serves it now exists! This is the origin of Bagelgrave, a recurring café in our games usually located next to a graveyard, each city/place of note has only one, and they are open 24/7 to serve lovely really overpriced coffee and stale bagels. They knowingly exist to cater to vampires (and sometimes other supernaturals) needing to meet at odd hours. Customers served =/= people served.
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May 19, 2016 18:35
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Ambi posted:This is the origin of Bagelgrave, a recurring café in our games usually located next to a graveyard, each city/place of note has only one, and they are open 24/7 to serve lovely really overpriced coffee and stale bagels. For my group's most recent campaign, we created one called Wokarelli's, a Chinese-Italian fusion restaurant. One of our players likes to cook and he wants to try making one of the dishes we made up in our next session (though I can't remember which one). The owner is a Geist who also has connections to one of the local mobs so we get to double-dip with the fusion. 
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May 19, 2016 18:48
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Bedlamdan posted:Well, for all we know the girl could've been up to some deeply hosed up poo poo, like drawing whitewashed Steven Universe fanart. LMAO!!!!!!!
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May 19, 2016 21:13
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Mors Rattus posted:Yeah, but it sure as hell ain't what I'm looking for in Mage, not when the other areas have poo poo like 'a city that regularly spawns portals to alternate universes' or 'a city where you can wander around and accidentally end up causing a blackout because you walked a path the shape of the rune for lightning' or 'a city where nonexistent bells that ring and cause the ghosts of the future dead to appear'. I'm reasonably sure it was by David Hill, if only because he lives in Japan and wrote about the country in other WoD books.
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May 19, 2016 23:58
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I hate to say it, but the earlier draft of Beast gets worse than mean girl "supervillains". The book includes a demo scenario revolving around an NPC's plot to attain the Begotten version of Ascension (the Apex). Admittedly, it's supposed to be a story about taking responsibility for your actions. The plot comes down to a choice between helping or hindering her. If Esmee's plan succeeds, people will die, and New Orleans will become a big Bat Signal for Hunters, Heroes, and anyone else along those lines. She might be Family, or at least a friend, but is that any reason to stand by and let her throw the city into chaos? On the other hand, if the PCs interfere with her plan, they'll have made a powerful enemy. Esmee is explicitly designed so that a group of newly created characters won't stand much of a chance if they try to fight her. Which is part of the problem. The choice doesn't feel meaningful. If they step aside or help Esmee, a living thunderstorm will rampage across the southern US. But opposing her would cause a setback in her plans that is significant, but temporary at best. She can just try again. And there's nothing stopping her from wiping out the PCs to make sure they're no longer a problem. Also, Esmee is a moron. This is someone who has to be reminded that setting off an explosive chemical weapon in the middle of New Orleans might not be a good idea. On the flipside, the antagonist Heroes are sympathetic and have every reason to be hunting her. One is a cop who (was strongly implied to have) lost her mother to a Beast. The other is an failed musician who saw Esmee committing arson. I think we're supposed to consider them losers. Allain (the failed musician) is an alcoholic who is jealous of the bands that he barely makes a living by promoting. Rhonda wasn't good enough to reach her dream of becoming a detective like her family members. They're under the delusion that they're protecting the city and will be regarded as heroes once they stop Esmee. Not much of a delusion. I'm afraid to ask, but was this scenario changed at all for the version of Beast that's out now?
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May 22, 2016 07:52
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I don't think they're under a delusion if the beast is planning an actual CRBN attack on a major metropolitan area. That's straight up 'yeah these are legit heroes right here' stuff.
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May 22, 2016 07:54
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So hey, I am putting together a very casual Mage: the Awakening 2E tabletop for my three friends. It has already started with their various Awakenings. Gonna summarize in brief here: The first is an Acanthus conspiracy crank and Internet cryptography enthusiast. He wound up abandoning his day job to chase what he thought was the solution to an extant Cicada 3301 puzzle for the weekend. In the process, he stumbled around in a seemingly-hidden labyrinth beneath his Baltimore apartment building's boiler room, met Mothman in some basement cranny, who freaked him the gently caress out, and right across the Abyss to Acanthus Awakening. The second is an Obrimos, a Liberian-born electrical engineering post-grad student. He grew up very straight-laced and sheltered in his tight-knit religious community, only to land a glitzy scholarship for sustainable energy development in a Hamburg, Germany university. His dissertation loomed over the weeks leading up to his Awakening, culminating in a coffee-fueled math binge where he saw the name of God as a physics formula... and is still only tenuously sane. The Thyrsus is relatively simple in origin. She was a virology grad student from Atlanta who webcam stripped her way out of student loans while making the Dean's List, only to find herself exposed to a freaky virus that actively altered its manifested symptoms to elude diagnosis, and nearly killed her. The ensuing fever dreams saw her tear her parents' house apart as she attempted to find the source of the alien voices from the Shadow, culminating in a sweaty, histrionic ecstasy where she and the virus "melded", or so her Pattern tells her now. Their Obsessions are fairly plain. The Acanthus' is "Mastering Arcane Ciphers", the Obrimos' is "Harnessing Eldritch Energies", and the Thyrsus' is "Exploring the Life/Matter Divide". The Acanthus is now firmly a conspiracy crank, since being able to hallucinate interconnections in destiny and the flow of time certainly doesn't hurt that. The Obrimos is finding it increasingly difficult to parse all of the information that is now flooding his mind, body, and soul, and may soon become unhinged. Meanwhile, the Thyrsus is fascinated and horrified all at once at the changes to her biology, and is really, REALLY nervous about all of the implications of them. For their "everyone meets up and forms a Cabal" deal, I've had the Silver Ladder in San Francisco manage to finally pull off a Greater Convocation. The date happened to land right when these three Awakened. Because everyone is just waiting for poo poo to go down at the event that has never successfully assembled in over a century, the three Neophytes were variously manipulated into going. The purpose of this event is to tie the conflict back to it, as various terrible things will happen at the Greater Convocation that resonate throughout the three Neophytes' lives. The Magisterium understands, at least on a rudimentary level, that the Convocation is a failure already, but its disastrous aftershocks will only occur after the event officially ends. Being Thearchs, of course, they want to avert this doom, seeing as its existence is just another condition of the Lie to them. It's up to the Neophytes to choose what will happen to the Awakened world afterwards. What do you guys think would be some cool spin-offs for plot ideas? I have some, but if you have cool freaking ideas, I'd like to hear them! I'll provide internet gold for them!
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May 22, 2016 08:34
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Loomer posted:I don't think they're under a delusion if the beast is planning an actual CRBN attack on a major metropolitan area. That's straight up 'yeah these are legit heroes right here' stuff. I remember the thing where Beasts were first being previewed and I was still like "Cool!" and Heroes as a concept were introduced and I was like "Hm, I mean it sounds like these guys are just passively brainwashed into being evil. That sounds kinda sympathetic, is there anything about that?" and got the whole "You just can't see past the fact your preconception that heroes are good and beasts are evil! Broaden your mind! Also why won't people stop being mean to the MRAs too right?" thing, which is hilarious given heroes later turned out to be people brainwashed into being the good guys.
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May 22, 2016 10:39
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DeTosh posted:On the flipside, the antagonist Heroes are sympathetic and have every reason to be hunting her. One is a cop who (was strongly implied to have) lost her mother to a Beast. The other is an failed musician who saw Esmee committing arson. I think we're supposed to consider them losers. Allain (the failed musician) is an alcoholic who is jealous of the bands that he barely makes a living by promoting. Rhonda wasn't good enough to reach her dream of becoming a detective like her family members. They're under the delusion that they're protecting the city and will be regarded as heroes once they stop Esmee. Not much of a delusion. I'm afraid to ask, but was this scenario changed at all for the version of Beast that's out now? Those just sound like the normal class of tarnished, hard-luck hero that shows up in WoD. 'These two people have had hard lives full of disappointment but are willing to stand up to supernatural evil when the call comes' is basically how mortal Chronicles of Darkness go, isn't it?
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May 22, 2016 13:52
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spectralent posted:I remember the thing where Beasts were first being previewed and I was still like "Cool!" and Heroes as a concept were introduced and I was like "Hm, I mean it sounds like these guys are just passively brainwashed into being evil. That sounds kinda sympathetic, is there anything about that?" and got the whole "You just can't see past the fact your preconception that heroes are good and beasts are evil! Broaden your mind! Also why won't people stop being mean to the MRAs too right?" thing, which is hilarious given heroes later turned out to be people brainwashed into being the good guys. This is no longer the case. It's buried in a sidebar in the DM's chapter but heroes are no longer made, they're born. The "Good" heroes understand their place in the world and don't interfere in Beast Business but the "Evil" heroes are all egotistical assholes who want to be famous and the best way to do that is to scrawl their name in beast blood across the fabric of the collective unconscious. Said sidebar also mentions "oh yeah Beasts are born too please ignore the poo poo I was forced to write by the evil kickstarter backers."
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May 22, 2016 14:59
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Kurieg posted:This is no longer the case. It's buried in a sidebar in the DM's chapter but heroes are no longer made, they're born. The "Good" heroes understand their place in the world and don't interfere in Beast Business but the "Evil" heroes are all egotistical assholes who want to be famous and the best way to do that is to scrawl their name in beast blood across the fabric of the collective unconscious. Oh, yeah, I know that, but it's kind of funny how the whole kickstarter thing came out with "No trust me heroes are horrible people" then when the preview came out, nah, heroes are at worst justified and at best actually stopping people loving chemical bombing towns.
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May 22, 2016 17:36
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I straight up do not see how you make the people who are trying to stop the murder of thousands and widespread environmental destruction the bad guys other than by constructing an ethics where what the would-be mass murderer and ravager of the countryside wants is by definition good. That's straight up "What is good for me is right."
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May 22, 2016 19:05
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I just finished writing up part of the next chapter of Beast for F&F and it's full of Matt pulling poo poo like "perhaps beasts really are born who can tell the truth?" and now beasts are victimized throughout their lives due to their upbringing and they're totally justified killing these other people who were also born because they just weren't born special enough. Like seriously how did he get away with this poo poo?
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May 22, 2016 19:41
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Kurieg posted:I just finished writing up part of the next chapter of Beast for F&F and it's full of Matt pulling poo poo like "perhaps beasts really are born who can tell the truth?" and now beasts are victimized throughout their lives due to their upbringing and they're totally justified killing these other people who were also born because they just weren't born special enough. I'm deeply disappointed in everybody else at OP for not loving doing something about this.
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May 22, 2016 19:55
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Kurieg posted:I just finished writing up part of the next chapter of Beast for F&F and it's full of Matt pulling poo poo like "perhaps beasts really are born who can tell the truth?" and now beasts are victimized throughout their lives due to their upbringing and they're totally justified killing these other people who were also born because they just weren't born special enough. Well, for one, being able to spot that he'd done a halfassed rewrite requires rereading the entire freaking book, and I could barely stand reading that fiction and fluff the first time with the Kickstarter version. Heck, every time I read a WW book or almost any other RPG book, I tend to skim fiction bits (not setting bits, the short stories) unless they strike me as especially good. They usually don't. So most people would probably TL;DR after the first time so only the "faithful" would notice all the dog-whistling.
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May 22, 2016 20:01
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Kurieg posted:I just finished writing up part of the next chapter of Beast for F&F and it's full of Matt pulling poo poo like "perhaps beasts really are born who can tell the truth?" and now beasts are victimized throughout their lives due to their upbringing and they're totally justified killing these other people who were also born because they just weren't born special enough. Like, as much as we all like to wring our hands about this, at the end of the day he can just point to the scoreboard and shrug, yeah? It made money! It was a success before it was even released. It turns out people wanted a game about this stuff. And it's not like either Onyx Path or White Wolf have any history of shying away from some repulsive subject matter. That's kind of most of the WoD's thing to a lot of people. They released a book about Slashers, including deliberate rules for making them playable, and a lot of us liked it. It sucks, but like. Why would he face any repercussions for successfully launching a game? Have I missed something there?
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May 22, 2016 21:50
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Bikindok posted:People bought it. Because several people backed it with the tacit understanding that it would be rewritten. Because Rich Thomas and McFarland both made promises that the tone of the game would be changed, and I'm not talking about stuff that was written previously and not changed, I'm talking about poo poo that was added to the PDF sometime between december 2015 and the PDF's actual release. Having the response to fan criticism be sneering derision and mockery means that there's no way in hell I'm buying another product with McFarland's name attached to it. And I'm definitely not going to trust Rich as much as I used to. They've squandered a gigantic pile of fan goodwill to put out what amounts to purile revenge fantasy and I just can't understand why.
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May 22, 2016 22:15
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Bikindok posted:They released a book about Slashers, including deliberate rules for making them playable, and a lot of us liked it. The problem isn't that you're playing the baddies, it's how playing the baddies is presented.
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May 22, 2016 22:39
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Yawgmoth posted:But that's not even in the same ballpark as Beast. Hell, it's not even playing the same sport in the same timezone, to belabor the metaphor. Beast is a game about "the MRAs are the good guys and totally in the right regardless of ends or means" and the book does nothing but encourage this mindset both in and out of character. Slashers on the other hand is billed primarily as an antagonist book; it tells you in no uncertain terms that the characters created are hosed up, they are wrong and bad and need to be stopped, and you can play them as PCs if you want but know that you're playing The Bad Guys and that the likely endgame is "VASCU shuts you down by hook or by crook." Hell, Vampire is about playing terrible abusers, but the book's not shy about the fact vampire hunters are justified and the world would probably be better off if the vampires were all dead. Also I always thought "the same ball park" was one of those big places with toy balls kids play. I learned a thing.
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May 22, 2016 22:52
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Yawgmoth posted:But that's not even in the same ballpark as Beast. Hell, it's not even playing the same sport in the same timezone, to belabor the metaphor. Beast is a game about "the MRAs are the good guys and totally in the right regardless of ends or means" and the book does nothing but encourage this mindset both in and out of character. Slashers on the other hand is billed primarily as an antagonist book; it tells you in no uncertain terms that the characters created are hosed up, they are wrong and bad and need to be stopped, and you can play them as PCs if you want but know that you're playing The Bad Guys and that the likely endgame is "VASCU shuts you down by hook or by crook."
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May 22, 2016 22:55
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Yawgmoth posted:But that's not even in the same ballpark as Beast. Hell, it's not even playing the same sport in the same timezone, to belabor the metaphor. Beast is a game about "the MRAs are the good guys and totally in the right regardless of ends or means" and the book does nothing but encourage this mindset both in and out of character. Slashers on the other hand is billed primarily as an antagonist book; it tells you in no uncertain terms that the characters created are hosed up, they are wrong and bad and need to be stopped, and you can play them as PCs if you want but know that you're playing The Bad Guys and that the likely endgame is "VASCU shuts you down by hook or by crook."
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May 23, 2016 00:21
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Bikindok posted:That's a fair response, yeah, and that's probably why we're okay with it in other gamelines. The point I was failing to make is that as much as we'd like that not to be the case, the CoD community contains sufficent weird people that games like Beast can and will be successful, so it's just bizarre to expect them to cut ties with McFarland over him successfully selling the book. Like, yeah it generated controversy, but I don't think they really care as long as books are still selling and so far they are.
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May 23, 2016 00:45
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At a certain point the question needs to become not "can this sell" but "should we sell this" and "Is this the customer base that we want to cultivate?"
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May 23, 2016 01:15
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OP has already tried to push beyond the established wants of its audience and been handily rebuked. If the talk of the Masquerade coming back and Requiem / Strix being sidelined is true, at least. Beast sounds right up the alley of the Masquerade stans I've known.
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May 23, 2016 01:38
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Basic Chunnel posted:OP has already tried to push beyond the established wants of its audience and been handily rebuked. If the talk of the Masquerade coming back and Requiem / Strix being sidelined is true, at least. Beast sounds right up the alley of the Masquerade stans I've known. I'm not aware of anything from Requiem being cut from the schedule. They don't tell me everything but generally it's not a matter of a set amount of effort being split between WoD and CofD buckets, especially since WoD stuff is secured through Kickstarter and CofD, less so.
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May 23, 2016 02:03
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Basic Chunnel posted:OP has already tried to push beyond the established wants of its audience and been handily rebuked. If the talk of the Masquerade coming back and Requiem / Strix being sidelined is true, at least. Beast sounds right up the alley of the Masquerade stans I've known. OP is going to keep on keeping on with nWoD, it's Paradox who are moving forward with Masquerade.
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May 23, 2016 02:55
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Basic Chunnel posted:OP has already tried to push beyond the established wants of its audience and been handily rebuked. If the talk of the Masquerade coming back and Requiem / Strix being sidelined is true, at least. Beast sounds right up the alley of the Masquerade stans I've known. Hey, I'm a Masquerade partisan - the biggest one here, in all likelihood - and even I find Beast repugnant. Don't drag us into the mire just because we enjoy ridiculous goth vampire superheros.
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May 23, 2016 04:07
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Yawgmoth posted:"OPP is a company that goes back on their word and also produces material that would be right at home with Freak Legion: Fomori and WoD: Gypsies." That's the kind of bad publicity that gets an rpg company dead in the water. Having never read FL or WOD:G were they just bad books in general or highly stereotypical tone deafness and borderline racist from the same company that gave us Ravenos: the Gypsy Clan, the Bloodthirsty Viking Werewolf Tribe, and Indian Death Magic / Aboriginal Primitivism Magic?
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May 23, 2016 04:19
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Gypsies is a book that talks about magical blood purity and has specific skills and magic powers for stealing things, conning people out of money, drinking, and cheating gadjo. Freak Legion, on the other hand, is a mostly reasonable gonzo game about playing Fomori that has an unfortunate tendency to veer into sexual territory, but by the standards of Beast and Gypsies is actually a sane and well reasoned product - largely because it isn't an extended 'you deserve to be abused you loving normals' revenge creed that tries to make the abusers morally superior or an unfortunate screed about how one of the most persecuted groups in human history really are just like, inherently different to us you guys and is instead just a splatterpunk game that needs the weird sex stuff cut out.
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May 23, 2016 04:24
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I took a look at Freak Legion once because I heard stories about it but I didn't get what the big deal was. I only looked at the first fifty pages or so. All I got was that it was about playing the bad guy minions (I know very little about oWerewolf besides what I see on message boards) and I think there was probably a dickteeth or vaginateeth power, but that's about it. CofD has Undead Menses as a merit and a book with a naked woman on the cover so I didn't really get what the hubbub was.
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May 23, 2016 05:28
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The closest book to beast, in tone, execution, and bad game design is Changeling: the Dreaming (aka the pedophile game). Beast is the most oWoD game since the death of the oWoD.
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May 23, 2016 06:10
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MonsieurChoc posted:The closest book to beast, in tone, execution, and bad game design is Changeling: the Dreaming (aka the pedophile game). Jeez, tell me about it. Earlier in the thread someone compared it to nWoD Changing Breeds, which was also apt. Apparently the main developer for nWoD Changing Breeds was an utter nutbar, but makes the content of the book make more sense in context. McFarland did a lot of work on Promethean, which at least had compelling content, even if it is rarely played, as far as we know. How disconnected from reality did they get when they wrote this stuff?
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May 23, 2016 06:49
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I know TG is obsessed with the idea, but Changeling: the Dreaming is not a pedophile game, like, at all.
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