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The rule that was removed was that more 1s than successes equals a Dramatic Failure: now it's 1s without any successes that causes them.
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May 26, 2016 17:16
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Conversely, Mummy's TN-shifting powers are pretty strictly circumscribed. They usually don't provide more than a 2 point shift, are firmly limited to a TN 6-10 range, and usually don't stack. A strictly limited TN 6-10 range only accessible through different tiers of supernatural power (which iirc is pretty close to what the Aberrant/Scion/Trinity system you wrote does?) is cool, but adding that to a single splat in which TN is otherwise constant and the simplicity of the mechanics that represent ease/difficulty is a selling point is a lovely move. Besides, as you well know, if any splat should've gotten the inexplicable and alien power to alter the very dice themselves, it should've been mages. A good point many people are making is that the weird distinction in oWoD wasn't actually been number of dice and target number - almost nothing that I remember actually added or subtracted dice that wasn't completely internal to your character (e.g. their actual stats and how many actions they were trying at once). The real gently caress is that actions were hard both in terms of total required successes and how unlikely each of those successes were to get.
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May 26, 2016 21:17
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Doodmons posted:They do in V20, M20 and Orpheus, the 3 oWoD games I have actually read and/or played, all of which post-date Revised. In the end in the V20 game I was in, we stopped using 1s subtract from successes when we heard the devs houseruled that out in their games. V20's the only book I have to hand, but page 250 under "botches": Weird. That was removed in some Revised era stuff. I agree that bringing it back/keeping it is not a great idea. EDIT: You guys are right. Success removers stayed, but there have to be 0 successes to begin with (before removing successes) and 1 or more 1s on the face. Sorry about that; I've been deep in Storypath lately. MalcolmSheppard fucked around with this message at 22:32 on May 26, 2016 |
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May 26, 2016 22:20
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Pope Guilty posted:Also you seem to be under the impression that people can do complex probability in our heads. Not really. d10s are inherently decimals. The tricky thing is x agains/exploding dice. Before you add that feature you can simply multiply the number of successful die faces by 10 for a basic per-die probability, or treat each face as a 0.1 success for rough averaging purposes. Variable TNs do do a lot of weird things to exploding dice though. The idea that this is harder to do in your head than, say, figure out your chance of scoring 14 or higher on 3d6 is a hell of a thing.
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May 26, 2016 22:30
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Eh, the quickest ways involve dealing with cubes, which aren't exactly taught to be intuitive in the way the first twelve squares are.
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May 26, 2016 22:36
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Ferrinus posted:A strictly limited TN 6-10 range only accessible through different tiers of supernatural power (which iirc is pretty close to what the Aberrant/Scion/Trinity system you wrote does?) is cool, but adding that to a single splat in which TN is otherwise constant and the simplicity of the mechanics that represent ease/difficulty is a selling point is a lovely move. Besides, as you well know, if any splat should've gotten the inexplicable and alien power to alter the very dice themselves, it should've been mages. I can't speak for Mike, but the notion is that capital F Fate in Mummy is different from everything else, so the choice is esthetic. As for CWoD games, most fire-and-forget actions didn't have success criteria. You were simply rewarded for more successes. The exceptions are M:TAsc magick (which is why I don't like the floating difficulty) and a bunch of other edge cases. Like I said though: 25 years of design is going to feature some drift. Hell, everybody forgot that NWoD/CofD1e was supposed to use three factor dice pools for more than just fighting pretty fast too.
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May 26, 2016 22:37
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Not really. d10s are inherently decimals. The tricky thing is x agains/exploding dice. Before you add that feature you can simply multiply the number of successful die faces by 10 for a basic per-die probability, or treat each face as a 0.1 success for rough averaging purposes.
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May 26, 2016 22:38
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I'm not totally against two or even three-variable dice systems (oWoD is 3-variable, with pool, difficulty, and threshold; Exalted 1/2 is mostly 2-variable, with pool and difficulty, and nWoD is with the exception of Structure a 1-variable system with only pool changing.), but they create both an increase in mathematical overhead and have a proclivity towards combinatorial nightmares when you can alter several different variables at once, often without really adding anything of substance that simply modifying a single variable would do. However, their use requires very careful application in order to keep the mathematical overhead small and avoid combinatorial problems, and White Wolf has not shown itself capable of that kind of restraint except in the nWoD. When White Wolf's successors then decide it's time to go back to variable TNs in a WoD game, it makes a lot of people anxious for understandable reasons. From what I've heard nMummy isn't particularly egregious in this regard since their TN-altering powers are limited in scope, so you don't get any of the oMage-like effects where there's a million different ways to adjust TNs up and down when casting a spell. LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 22:50 on May 26, 2016 |
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May 26, 2016 22:39
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:The thing is if you have a system where you can adjust whether you have to score a 14 vs a 13, OR could change your 3d6 to 2d6 + 1d8, that's a bad system. And that's what you'd be comparing to in terms of ease of use vs the floating-TN/floating-pool system. Well no, because d10s in dice pools always have this property, even after you shift TNs, though before you add dice tricks.
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May 26, 2016 22:40
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LatwPIAT posted:I'm not totally against two or even three-variable dice systems (oWoD is 3-variable, with pool, difficulty, and threshold; Exalted 1/2 is mostly 2-variable, with pool and difficulty, and nWoD is with the exception of Structure a 1-variable system with only pool changing.), but they create both an increase in mathematical overhead and have a proclivity towards combinatorial nightmares when you can alter several different variables at once, often without really adding anything of substance that simply modifying a single variable would do. However, their use requires very careful application in order to keep the mathematical overhead small and avoid combinatorial problems, and White Wolf has not shown itself capable of that kind of restraint except in the nWoD. When White Wolf's successors then decide it's time to go back to variable TNs in a WoD game, it makes a lot of people anxious for understandable reasons. From what I've heard nMummy isn't particularly egregious in this regard since their TN-altering powers are limited in scope, so you don't get any of the oMage-like effects where there's a million different ways to adjust TNs up and down when casting a spell. Yeah. Mummy's TN-shifters are, as I've said, designed to fit in a particular box for a small set of supernatural powers. They're not a signal that variable TNs are a thing, generally. Hell, other designers are really jittery about it. As for restraint, as I've said before: 25 hears of design. And in the case of the 20th games, the general directive is to go for a greatest hits/encyclopedic feel that scoops some of it up, though this is changing since people have embraced them as living lines to perhaps a greater extent than anticipated.
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May 26, 2016 22:46
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Not really. d10s are inherently decimals. The tricky thing is x agains/exploding dice. Before you add that feature you can simply multiply the number of successful die faces by 10 for a basic per-die probability, or treat each face as a 0.1 success for rough averaging purposes. I can do this trivially, but lots of other people in this thread have noted that it's something they're not capable or interested in doing during a game. Like, I play Phoenix Command; I have a certain tolerance for multiplying numbers a lot because you can't swing a knife around in that game without multiplying a 1d3 roll by three different decimal factors, but I also recognize that for a lot of people, decimal multiplication is not really their thing. I don't think you can really just, as someone in the game design business, talk about how easy all the math is when you're, presumably, trying to make games marketed to the very people complaining about how hard the math is.
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May 26, 2016 22:50
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LatwPIAT posted:I can do this trivially, but lots of other people in this thread have noted that it's something they're not capable or interested in doing during a game. Like, I play Phoenix Command; I have a certain tolerance for multiplying numbers a lot because you can't swing a knife around in that game without multiplying a 1d3 roll by three different decimal factors, but I also recognize that for a lot of people, decimal multiplication is not really their thing. I don't think you can really just, as someone in the game design business, talk about how easy all the math is when you're, presumably, trying to make games marketed to the very people complaining about how hard the math is. I do wonder what the crossover market is between people who have trouble multiplying a single digit number by 10 or multiplying two single digit numbers and moving over a decimal is, and people for whom not knowing their fine-grained percentage chance of success is. Like, is there a real untapped market for probability wonks who have trouble with 5th grade arithmetic? One thing I will grant is that it is difficult to figure out the percentage chance of different numbers of successes on a dice pool, but this is true for fixed TNs. That's why fans have generated and published tables for them. Fortunately though, that's been done for you too: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OK1pf7N3tIoPYYhX0kL37s-awQ0owwKNZlopwZ4EjHI/edit#gid=0 MalcolmSheppard fucked around with this message at 23:07 on May 26, 2016 |
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May 26, 2016 23:02
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I can tell you what the chances of a particular die coming up at or above a given number are, because that's basic division. Hell, that's basically counting. But what percentage chance is there of two dice out of a particular pool coming in at or above that number? It's not like you can just add they percentages together. I can't do more than make a semi-educated guess. Probability is notoriously unintuitive and unless you've been taught the subject- and had it sick- it's almost certainly not a skill you just happen to have. This is something people in general are well known for being super bad at.
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May 26, 2016 23:07
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Pope Guilty posted:I can tell you what the chances of a particular die coming up at or above a given number are, because that's basic division. Hell, that's basically counting. But what percentage chance is there of two dice out of a particular pool coming in at or above that number? It's not like you can just add they percentages together. I can't do more than make a semi-educated guess. Probability is notoriously unintuitive and unless you've been taught the subject- and had it sick- it's almost certainly not a skill you just happen to have. This is something people in general are well known for being super bad at. Yeah, but that is a problem with dice pools generally. Hanging it on TN shifts is sort of beside the point. If you want a directly intuitive system, there's d% and single die systems. Beyond that this is just going to happen.
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May 26, 2016 23:10
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I don't think it's important for players to be able to easily calculate the percentage chance of success of an action. Like, what, you're willing to try something if it has a 42% chance to succeed, but not a 41% chance? Come on.MalcolmSheppard posted:I can't speak for Mike, but the notion is that capital F Fate in Mummy is different from everything else, so the choice is esthetic. That's really the problem. Every splat's supernatural powers is different from everything else, and yet all of them save one were able to be realized without breaking any of the nWoD's baseline game-mechanical assumptions. The TN shifting's an attention grab... but it's a cheap one, because the actual cool ways that Mummy breaks the setting's mold is in starting with power stat 10, the way their fueled-by-WP/fueled-by-Pillars stuff works, etc.
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May 26, 2016 23:12
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MalcolmSheppard posted:I do wonder what the crossover market is between people who have trouble multiplying a single digit number by 10 or multiplying two single digit numbers and moving over a decimal is, and people for whom not knowing their fine-grained percentage chance of success is. Like, is there a real untapped market for probability wonks who have trouble with 5th grade arithmetic? Well, firstly, thanks to exploding dice, its a bit more than 5th grade. (I see you fixed this in edit, so that's fair to go back on.) Secondly, if a game is complex enough that you have to do that kind of math at the table, it should clearly have a chart or sidebar spelling out what the math is on it so you don't have to, and I can't recall a time White Wolf or Onyx Path has ever been quite so transparent with their mechanics math. Thirdly, to be blunt, you've always seemed to me as somebody that's more of a writer and kibitzer than who's heavily experienced in seeing mechanics in action at the table. So when you lecture fans and players on what is or isn't more practical, it comes across as deeply condescending and offputting.
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May 26, 2016 23:18
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MalcolmSheppard posted:I do wonder what the crossover market is between people who have trouble multiplying a single digit number by 10 or multiplying two single digit numbers and moving over a decimal is, and people for whom not knowing their fine-grained percentage chance of success is. Like, is there a real untapped market for probability wonks who have trouble with 5th grade arithmetic? You had a dude with a doctorate come in and say that expecting people to accurately judge the outcome of a roll using the old system without professional training was presumptous, dude. There's an argument to be made here but you're sort of making yourself look like an rear end if you consider a scaling 9x10 matrix to be equivalent to fifth grade math.
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May 26, 2016 23:18
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MalcolmSheppard posted:I do wonder what the crossover market is between people who have trouble multiplying a single digit number by 10 or multiplying two single digit numbers and moving over a decimal is, and people for whom not knowing their fine-grained percentage chance of success is. Like, is there a real untapped market for probability wonks who have trouble with 5th grade arithmetic? I'm morbidly desirous to see you and John Wick make a system together.
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May 26, 2016 23:37
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I don't know what you guys are on about, when me and my friends work all week all we want to do is get together on the weekends and engage in ever more granular feats of math. In point of fact, when I think of what makes the Storyteller system stand out from the pack, it's the intensity and precision of the math involved. Just gimme that math
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May 26, 2016 23:43
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Daeren posted:You had a dude with a doctorate come in and say that expecting people to accurately judge the outcome of a roll using the old system without professional training was presumptous, dude. There's an argument to be made here but you're sort of making yourself look like an rear end if you consider a scaling 9x10 matrix to be equivalent to fifth grade math. For context my wife, who is not college taught, or even A-Level graded, hates math. But, she can easily tell having more dice in a pool is better. She can easily make a decision on character advancement. But, the moment she has to start making decisions because on the one hand one amount of dice, but on the other hand, she has less/more dice + shift in the TN in comparison... yeah, no, you've lost her. And as a GM I want my players to be able to make good informed decisions without the need for me to run the maths for them, or them to feel stupid for me having to do that for them. This attitude/approach of mine also comes from my undergrad days working part time in a GW store teaching kids to play wargames. Not all of the kids were good with the maths. But, intuitively, they could see what the chances were. Put simply; either vary the pool or vary the TN. Not both because for math-phobic types you obscure choices. Exception - Warmachine/Hordes and thus IKRPG uses a 2d6 system (nice bell curve so spiking is not present) is easy to make judgements with since the average roll is common knowledge, and loss or gaining of a d6 amount to +/- 3 on results against a TN. Other systems I like which are again intuitive (bias warning because I co-designed the 3rd ed of Noble Armada which is based on Fading Suns) is the VP system. Variable TN, single roll d20, but where the aim is to roll low, but high, for a degree of success also works nicely, because again the TN relies just on the attributes, and external modifiers.
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May 26, 2016 23:50
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MalcolmSheppard posted:I do wonder what the crossover market is between people who have trouble multiplying a single digit number by 10 or multiplying two single digit numbers and moving over a decimal is, and people for whom not knowing their fine-grained percentage chance of success is. Like, is there a real untapped market for probability wonks who have trouble with 5th grade arithmetic? I think most people retain enough math to survive whatever their day to day is and eject all the rest. Hope this helps.
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May 26, 2016 23:54
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dr_ether posted:For context my wife, who is not college taught, or even A-Level graded, hates math. But, she can easily tell having more dice in a pool is better. She can easily make a decision on character advancement. But, the moment she has to start making decisions because on the one hand one amount of dice, but on the other hand, she has less/more dice + shift in the TN in comparison... yeah, no, you've lost her. Really, the problem here isn't that it's hard to calculate, but that there's a right answer. If you want more successes, you pick 5 dice t7, not 6 dice t8. The former's just better, and any game mechanic that asks a player to choose one or the other is just wasting that players' time. That's why a system like ORE that cares both about success count and success quality assigns different narrative meanings to each, such that you're not simply playing a math game to maximize one value but choosing between two different values with different effects on the story.
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May 26, 2016 23:55
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Ferrinus posted:Really, the problem here isn't that it's hard to calculate, but that there's a right answer. If you want more successes, you pick 5 dice t7, not 6 dice t8. The former's just better, and any game mechanic that asks a player to choose one or the other is just wasting that players' time. That's why a system like ORE that cares both about success count and success quality assigns different narrative meanings to each, such that you're not simply playing a math game to maximize one value but choosing between two different values with different effects on the story. Funny enough, wasn't ORE literally invented because Stolze used to work for White Wolf and realized that nobody had any idea what the actual mathematical difference was between requiring more successes vs using a higher TN?
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May 27, 2016 00:54
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ProfessorCirno posted:Funny enough, wasn't ORE literally invented because Stolze used to work for White Wolf and realized that nobody had any idea what the actual mathematical difference was between requiring more successes vs using a higher TN? That was exactly it. He asked some other writer/developer and was told "we don't know either, just follow your heart". (I used to misremember this as him being uncertain between TN increases and dicepool reductions, but oWoD didn't really have stuff mess with your dicepool)
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May 27, 2016 00:58
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I'm planning on running Mage 2e sometime in the near future, but want to design the city it's going to be set in first. I've got Damnation City ready to go, but does anyone have any other book suggestions, Mage or Otherwise, 1st or 2nd Ed, for designing a good CofD setting?
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May 27, 2016 01:27
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cptn_dr posted:I'm planning on running Mage 2e sometime in the near future, but want to design the city it's going to be set in first. I've got Damnation City ready to go, but does anyone have any other book suggestions, Mage or Otherwise, 1st or 2nd Ed, for designing a good CofD setting? Damnation City is all that's really necessary. Anything else would be non-WoD resources, really, depending on how in-depth you want to get when making a city. You could look at example default cities in the other lines for inspiration, I suppose.
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May 27, 2016 01:33
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General mage tips: It's easy to start by statting up a Hierarch and Councilors and Provosts and Sentinels and etc of each path/order, but I would discourage you from that kind of top-down approach. Don't focus too much on the details of high-level Consilium politics before the game starts. I recommend starting with detailing the neighborhood the PCs will be based in, coming up with a few hooks and local NPCs they can crash into in session 1, and fleshing out other neighborhoods and districts and cabals as they enter the story organically. I feel like I see a lot of STs start on session one with a big list of all the titled Consilium officials and their backstories and then the PCs never deal with 75% of them. e: if you're open to non-CofD sources, there's a Dungeon World supplement that I think is called "Planarch Codex" which has some interesting ideas and rules for presenting and fleshing out a fantastic city as the players explore it. Kellsterik fucked around with this message at 01:44 on May 27, 2016 |
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May 27, 2016 01:40
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I hope to be running Mage in the future, and my goal will be to let the players create their characters first, with some setting information (since they're all new to the game), and then build the city around what interests them. Someone's got high Death? Better get some spooky ghosts in there!
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May 27, 2016 02:17
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ProfessorCirno posted:Funny enough, wasn't ORE literally invented because Stolze used to work for White Wolf and realized that nobody had any idea what the actual mathematical difference was between requiring more successes vs using a higher TN? And suddenly Reign snaps into focus for me.
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May 27, 2016 02:28
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New Orleans is never a bad city to draw occult inspiration from.
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May 27, 2016 02:42
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brb gonna set a whole fuckin chronicle in the basement of Denver International Airport
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May 27, 2016 02:48
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Don't forget Australia. When it comes to magic places, we got it in spades since we were born in the Age of Aquarius as a nation. Lots and lots of occultists packed up and moved here or sent their students and disciples to open branches. It's why one of the largest broadcast stations in the country, 2GB, is named for Giordano Bruno, half our first few PMs and Founders were Theosophists, Canberra actually was designed with occult architecture in mind unlike DC, with the architect for the city becoming an anthroposophist. We built huge open air ampitheatres in anticipation of the arrival of a great teacher. What I'm saying is Australian history is a vast and usually untapped resource for occult inspiration. As a nation, we had - and still have - strong links and associations with a lot of weird poo poo.
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May 27, 2016 02:51
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Loomer posted:Don't forget Australia. When it comes to magic places, we got it in spades since we were born in the Age of Aquarius as a nation. Lots and lots of occultists packed up and moved here or sent their students and disciples to open branches. It's why one of the largest broadcast stations in the country, 2GB, is named for Giordano Bruno, half our first few PMs and Founders were Theosophists, Canberra actually was designed with occult architecture in mind unlike DC, with the architect for the city becoming an anthroposophist. We built huge open air ampitheatres in anticipation of the arrival of a great teacher. Y'know this explains an odd amount. If you want to go on at length, please feel free, this poo poo's already fascinating.
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May 27, 2016 02:57
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Loomer posted:Don't forget Australia. When it comes to magic places, we got it in spades since we were born in the Age of Aquarius as a nation. Lots and lots of occultists packed up and moved here or sent their students and disciples to open branches. It's why one of the largest broadcast stations in the country, 2GB, is named for Giordano Bruno, half our first few PMs and Founders were Theosophists, Canberra actually was designed with occult architecture in mind unlike DC, with the architect for the city becoming an anthroposophist. We built huge open air ampitheatres in anticipation of the arrival of a great teacher. As the guy who reviewed it I would like to personally apologize for Rage Across Australia.
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May 27, 2016 03:38
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I'm going to avoid going into indigenous magical tradition here because most of what's written about it isn't great, being either outdated or blatantly incorrect, and what few practices I am personally privy to are sacred and not to be shared. That said, the book 'Aboriginal Men of High Degree' is worth reading with the caveat it tends to be a little 'universalist' - but as a product of the 1950s it is a remarkably sensitive, reasonable, sympathetic approach to the subject of indigenous customary magic, spirituality, and practice, all of which may be of some use. The dreamtime especially is a beautiful way of understanding how other worlds can simultaneously exist overlapping with our own, interacting with it while being distinct, operating on their own laws and customs. The popular whitefella conception of it is 'a past place' but it's actually a past, present, and future all overlapping simultaneously. Even the term dreamtime isn't quite right, but it's what we use now for it. Either way, I'll mostly be focusing on the whitefella's experience of magic in Australia. Let's start with Crowley and Frank Bennett. Bennett was an English-born Aussie who was part of the theosophical society, Co-Masonry (Freemasonry, but with ladies as well as men), the A:.A:. and the OTO. He moved here in 1911 with the express goal of starting up more co-masonic lodges in Australia, which he did quite handily (and if ever a society has lead to greater cross-pollination of esotericism and occultism with a broad swathe of society than Freemasonry in all its forms in the late 19th and early 20th century, I can't think of it) and served as the GM of it here, before resigning and rejoining the OTO. He started the first OTO temple in Australia in Sydney, served as the leader of the Order here for seven years, then went to the Abbey in person where Crowley made him one of his closest advisors. Officially, they dissolved in 1922 after an expose, but even that has a great story seed - sinister occultists going into hiding, starting their own hidden sects in pursuit of strange ends. On the subject of Canberra's architecture, Walter Burley Griffin was an American architect who won a contest to design the city, along with his wife. Both of them were strong believers in sacred architecture, practiced as theosophists, and later became Anthroposophists in the 20s, in Sydney which saw a sudden boost of theosophists, anthroposophists, and Christian Scientists in the early 20s (say, isn't that right around the time when Bennett 'dismissed' the Australian OTO?) His design was essentially that of a great pyramid consisting of smaller pyramids, pentagrams, and circles, a cosmic city for what he saw as the potential greatest nation because of its time, place, and circumstance - a nation that needed the right kind of symbolic architecture to be pushed in the right direction. The city's entire design was meant to come to a final point in the proposed Capitol building, a public meeting space as well as one for politics, with all the energies of the young nation pooling and swelling in it. The whole thing was to be built around feng shui and sacred geometry, containing multiple hidden symbols and sigils in the street layout. Unfortunately, the design wound up being only partly used, so instead of a new consciousness for a new race of people (we'll get to that one shortly) we've wound up with one of the most blatantly corrupt western parliaments anywhere. That in itself is a huge possible story for Demon, for Mage, even for Vampire - what was planned, what actually happened, and who did it? Who shifted the design, who shitcanned the Griffins behind the scenes, who made sure the new design would be psychically polluting? For Demon especially, the mind races to the possibility of a similar city where nearly everything wrong is because demons decades ago subverted the God-Machine's plans for a colossal piece of infrastructure by making sure the 'wrong' architect won. Other places they built encode pythagorean and platonic ideals and symbols in hidden ways, like Melbourne's Capitol theatre and their various Incinerators. Now, that whole 'new race' thing. Theosophy has the idea that there are 7 'root races' - seven stages of human spiritual evolution, basically. The fifth was the modern man in all his kinds (except asians, who were of the fourth root race, which didn't suggest inferiority but is certainly a rather unfortunate aspect of that whole 'it was the 1800s' thing), and had multiple subraces. Blavatsky saw the most important subrace of the fifth root race emerging here in Australia and New Zealand, where by the synthesis of the fourth and fifth roots together, a superior kind of human being would emerge, nourished by the perfect storm of spiritual forces in the nation. One of her disciples said we would be possessed of psychic powers and the power to synthesize the contradictory and the absurd into coherency, and if that doesn't sound like a mage I don't know what does. The nation itself, along with New Zealand, was supposed to itself be of a superior developing kind, born of all the glory of the now with a chance not to make the mistakes of the past, to seize man's destiny! All pretty inspiring stuff, but unfortunately we didn't take it. There's a quote that I like about what happened, since they spoke of shortsighted greed infecting us and turning us from spiritual advancement to material glory, and of how we had to be vigilant as a nation. The quote isn't by them, but it's about that stage of our history. "It looked as though in the contest between Mammon and ‘millennial Eden’ Mammon had won. The dreams of all those who had migrated to the great south land had evaporated. The Aborigine had been corrupted and debased by contact with the white man... Mammon had infected the ancient continent of Australia. The dreams of humanity had ended in an age of ruins." That's Manning Clark. His work has flaws, but he had a great turn of phrase and sense of poetry. Now, if memory serves hubris and the Fall of human potential is a big deal in nMage, yeah? Well, how about an entire nation that rose as a new Atlantis only to collapse in on itself, overwhelmed by pettiness and spite, its secret orders collapsing and running to the shadows, its great symbolic capitol debased by lesser plans? You can't get better than that for making the old new and the new old. Moving to an older, less grand model of esotericism and occultism: cunning folk and hedge craft. Our historians keep finding just plain weird-rear end poo poo whenever they do a dig on settler cottages. Witch bottles, sacrificed cats, buried talismans, the SATOR AREPO carved on pillars, etc. This is where I'm going to note the importance of where most early Australian settlers came from: Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall and Yorkshire. Those same places kept the 'cunning folk' tradition alive in Britain longer than anywhere else, and you can still find remnant traces of it there, but most especially over in the Ozarks and Appalachians in America (which share the same migration pattern) - and a whole lot of what they keep digging up is very close to stuff we have records of from the Appalachian region. So, for early settlers, you've got a strange landscape populated by a superstitious people who practice small charms and rituals on a regular basis. All kinds of neat backwoods poo poo you can work with there, especially with the interplay with indigenous spirituality - which is underrecognized but had a major role in determining the early Australian mindset, and is part of why we do an awful lot of magical realism stuff in our media without even thinking it's unusual. It's that same contact and cross-pollination that made us an especially fertile ground (along with the theosophists, Golden Dawners, Rosicrucians and Crowleyites earlier) for neopaganism when it came knocking in the 50s. We had neo-Odinism before it was cool, Wiccans found a bunch of people doing similar stuff already and subsumed them in, and by the time the 'new age' started we were already pretty well established. Going to take a break here, but there's some solid ideas to harvest, and that's just the surface.
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May 27, 2016 03:54
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My own campaign will be set up with Melbourne being the main Consilium, sharing ties with the Greater West consilium (containing Geelong, Ballarat [site of the gold boom, probably hella magical] and Bendigo). Tasmania will technically be under Melbourne administration and going there is the equivalent of 'taking the black' in Game of Thrones, since it's a large island full of not much if you're a city person, but in my game will also be spiritually screwed up, due to its modern history and roamed by several werewolf packs. Why Melbourne? Well, it's where I live, and really I can't not be inspired by seeing the following across the road from a large shopping centre and a big university complex:  What's their cover? 
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May 27, 2016 04:12
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That'd be the Ancient Order of Druids, the quasi-masonic fraternal druidry order. My granddad was a member. Also, it is some hefty synchronicity that you're Australian.
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May 27, 2016 04:20
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join the druids
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May 27, 2016 05:13
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Also featuring: a symbolic attempt to reach Stygia (the old Lead Pipe and Shot factory), chained by the Lie (a shopping mall). The entire nine-story tower is indoors.
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May 27, 2016 05:49
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gently caress I love Melbourne. Running a game set in Auckland could be reasonably interesting, but it doesn't have the same feel as a lot of other cities.
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May 27, 2016 06:19
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