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I remember one of the first bug 'event' broadcast shows after LOST was a TV show where everyone in the world was passed out for, like, five minutes and all the horrible stuff that happened*. A week or two would be even worse. *also, everyone saw a future image of themselves, six months into the future
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Aug 29, 2016 21:02
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Gerund posted:I remember one of the first bug 'event' broadcast shows after LOST was a TV show where everyone in the world was passed out for, like, five minutes and all the horrible stuff that happened*. A week or two would be even worse.
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Aug 29, 2016 21:40
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Don't you die after 3 days without water? Surely after a week there would be no survivors.
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Aug 30, 2016 00:37
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Doodmons posted:Don't you die after 3 days without water? Surely after a week there would be no survivors. If you're thinking of the three hours/three days/three weeks rule, that's for survival scenarios in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. You can go three days without water under non-hostile conditions, it just won't be pleasant.
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Aug 30, 2016 01:49
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Wait, so like vampires are also down? I'd imagine they'd be making a priority out of rescuing as many humans as possible because otherwise, there goes their food source.
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Aug 30, 2016 02:22
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It seems like some world-shaking Changeling event that puts everyone to sleep for days would impose some kind of metabolism-suspending fairy tale stasis rather than a regular old coma.
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Aug 30, 2016 02:33
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Doodmons posted:Don't you die after 3 days without water? Surely after a week there would be no survivors. Three days is a helpful rule of thumb for physically active people in a temperate climate. It varies wildly. In the middle of the jungle, an active person will die sooner - they'll sweat far more than the temperate region or evena desert (as the sweat fails to cool the body, it sweats even more to try and compensate). Kavak posted:Do they specify that things wake up and basically go back to normal? Because "Yay! All that awful and banal modern civilization and its people are dead!" seems like a great end to a Changeling game. It does, yeah. Pope Guilty posted:Wait, so like vampires are also down? I'd imagine they'd be making a priority out of rescuing as many humans as possible because otherwise, there goes their food source. All vampires without the fae kin merits are down. Maybe some Malkavians and the Kiasyd aren't impacted. Other than those three groups, they all go torpid. Ferrinus posted:It seems like some world-shaking Changeling event that puts everyone to sleep for days would impose some kind of metabolism-suspending fairy tale stasis rather than a regular old coma. Well sure, but that's less apocalyptic and isn't mentioned in the text.
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Aug 30, 2016 05:08
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Loomer posted:All vampires without the fae kin merits are down. Maybe some Malkavians and the Kiasyd aren't impacted. Other than those three groups, they all go torpid. Welp, hope you're 8th Generation or better and full of blood when it hits, because otherwise you ain't waking up under your own power.
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Aug 30, 2016 05:41
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I feel like, even if there is a magical sleeping spell, this is still a pretty vicious event for humanity. Any supernaturals with the technical knowledge or inclination to do things like keep the power grid up (maybe the nockers go into overdrive to try and prevent calamitous knock-on effects, actually, which could be pretty cool. 'Where are the nockers?' 'The nockers are keeping literally everyone from dying right now, they don't have time to join the battle lines.' sorta deal) pass out alongside the humans. Presumably, those mechanical processes continue, with all the problems that entails. Most methods of liquid gas storage require large amounts of electricity, and that electricity will rapidly shutdown with no one attending to the grid. That means gas leaks, explosions, wildfires. Other systems will fail and vent chemicals into rivers. Anyone dependent on electricity to survive is in a real problem - ventilators shut down, as do any other machine, and even if the human beings survive by magic for 7 days, when they wake they wake without those electrical supports. It's going to be a bloodbath in hospitals. Anyone who was relying on those technologies can be written off even in a best scenario, so that's most of the average ICU, a distressing amount of infants, anyone on an operating table. Even if people are magically preserved for the days, anyone with a major medical crisis in the immediate aftermath is hosed - their doctors are waking up when they need to be clamping bloodflow, securing airlines, or other life-giving procedures. But worst of all, as I mentioned before, is the potential radiological threat to the world. Nuclear power plants are actually very safely designed for this kind of thing. The plant itself will just shut down once it detects a problem and no one intervenes within a safe amount of time (maybe not some of the ones in the former Soviet Union) and the reactor itself isn't the real threat. The real threat within the seven day period is the possibility towards the end of that span for spent fuel ponds to boil dry. In poorly designed ponds, that can cause a steam explosion. This isn't a nuclear blast, but it is a high powered explosion with a lot of nuclear material at its core, which means radioactive steam and particulates, followed by wildfires wherever the blasts are which will burn more of the fuel, spewing more radioactive particulates up. So unless our plucky Nocker heroes can keep the plants safe and secure with their gifts and their know-how, humanity may wake up to a world where suddenly there's no electricity, plumes of radioactive-particulate contaminated smoke and dust spewing into the sky and sea, alongside any physical damage caused by the war itself. You can turn the lights back on, but the problem is that seven days lost production does more than put a dent in profits. Oil wells overflow and spill or seal off. Some pipelines will burst from the pressure. Some factories and refineries will take days to bring back online once they shut down, while others will have incurred serious damage as routine problems that need human intervention go unaddressed. There's also going to be a sudden shortage of fresh foods, as produce and meat spoils in transit, in the store, and in people's homes. It's not a famine thing, but it does put more sudden strain on a system that's already going to be struggling to cope with the impact of seven days of total standstill. EDIT: This is without considering the direct damage caused by the greatest inanimae waking. Entire forests, rivers, and mountains literally get up and join the fighting. The potential collateral damage from this is tremendous, to say the least - the sudden loss of water along vital waterways as the river-spirits fight and die and never make it home, earthquakes from mountains tearing themselves from the ground... Loomer fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Aug 30, 2016 |
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Aug 30, 2016 06:45
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I'm not familiar with oWoD mythology, but since CofD Mage is one of my favorite gamelines: are there any Mages that could stay awake for that kind of endgame? In CofD, Acanthus mages are linked closely to Arcadia, so maybe a Fate Shielding (or a reflexive Unraveling?) effect might be able to do it? Sleep is also generally the domain of Mind, so maybe a competent Mastigos would have some sort of defense. No idea how this translates to oWoD though. I just want to believe that my favorite gameline is able to do something about some of these apocalypse scenarios.
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Aug 30, 2016 07:09
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I would have thought the practical effect of everyone suddenly going to sleep would be massive transportation-related death. Tens or hundreds of thousands die instantly on highways. Planes fall out of the sky. Trains run into walls or other trains at full speed.
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Aug 30, 2016 07:16
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What was the original intention of this scenario, anyway? It's obvious in retrospect that such events would lead to societal collapse and a minor apocalypse, but I'm guessing White Wolf wasn't really intending that of all things.
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Aug 30, 2016 07:31
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Each line in the Time of Judgement got several scenarios in varying degrees of apocalypse, from "not with a bang, but a whimper"* to Revelations-style poo poo. I think global nappy time was supposed to be one of the former, but they didn't think about the implications at all. *Vampire got God quietly smiting all the Kindred over the course of a few nights while leaving humanity unharmed and basically unaware, Werewolf had a scenario that took place almost entirely in the Umbra, etc.
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Aug 30, 2016 07:55
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blastron posted:I'm not familiar with oWoD mythology, but since CofD Mage is one of my favorite gamelines: are there any Mages that could stay awake for that kind of endgame? In CofD, Acanthus mages are linked closely to Arcadia, so maybe a Fate Shielding (or a reflexive Unraveling?) effect might be able to do it? Sleep is also generally the domain of Mind, so maybe a competent Mastigos would have some sort of defense. No idea how this translates to oWoD though. I just want to believe that my favorite gameline is able to do something about some of these apocalypse scenarios. As written? Only those linked to the Fae in some way. It explicitly rules out magic as a means of avoiding the sleep. A generous ST might make some of the Ecstatics, Verbena, and Dreamspeakers immune by dint of their practices, but any of the technomancers (including Etherites and the Virtual Adepts) are right out so the best candidates to actually protect humanity in such a situation are down for the count. NGDBSS posted:What was the original intention of this scenario, anyway? It's obvious in retrospect that such events would lead to societal collapse and a minor apocalypse, but I'm guessing White Wolf wasn't really intending that of all things. This one is meant to be a climactic Time of Judgment scenario built around the triumph of glamour over reason - myth over reality - for one last, glorious time. It's meant to be one of the most dramatic scenarios, but like most Changeling ToJ options, isn't intended to be a true cataclysm for anyone but the kithain. It sits in the middle tier of their apocalypses in intent, but comes out towards the 'absolutely disastrous' scale in actual implementation. Mendrian posted:I would have thought the practical effect of everyone suddenly going to sleep would be massive transportation-related death. Tens or hundreds of thousands die instantly on highways. Planes fall out of the sky. Trains run into walls or other trains at full speed. Anyone in immediately dangerous conditions, like driving, gets a chance to pull over or land before they pass out. Kavak posted:Each line in the Time of Judgement got several scenarios in varying degrees of apocalypse, from "not with a bang, but a whimper"* to Revelations-style poo poo. I think global nappy time was supposed to be one of the former, but they didn't think about the implications at all. Yeah. There's basically four tiers of apocalypse. Tier 1 only impacts the supernatural splat in question, maybe some others, except where power vacuums etc cause knock-on effects. Those effects might be quite serious - e.g. the VtM Gehenna novel, where the actual metaphysical apocalypse only hit vampires but the chaos created by it resulted in extreme chaos - but they aren't caused directly by the apocalypse itself. Tier 2 impacts the supernatural splat and overlaps onto humanity in a significant way, but without being what we'd consider a true calamity. Changeling has a scenario in which human beings lose their capacity to innovate and invent things, but people don't die en masse. Small amounts of major impact limited to a few areas are this tier as well. Tier 3 impacts the supernatural splat and overlaps onto humanity and everyone else in a major and extremely damaging way. This scenario is a tier 3, though I think it was intended to be a tier 2. Mass deaths, potential extinction, the collapse of human civilizations, etc. Grandmaw running wild would be tier 3 (with the quasi-kabbalist interpretation above, it becomes a 4) Tier 4 impacts on the cosmos itself. The ToJ novels I was speaking about earlier are, for Vampire, T1, Werewolf T3, and for Mage, T4 as the cosmos collapses back into Unity. You could argue for a Tier 0, which would be things like the scenario where all the vampires just die off over the course of 40 days and 40 nights with minimal impact on society, or put it as Tier 1 and move the others up by a notch. Loomer fucked around with this message at 08:10 on Aug 30, 2016 |
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Aug 30, 2016 07:58
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blastron posted:I'm not familiar with oWoD mythology, but since CofD Mage is one of my favorite gamelines: are there any Mages that could stay awake for that kind of endgame? In CofD, Acanthus mages are linked closely to Arcadia, so maybe a Fate Shielding (or a reflexive Unraveling?) effect might be able to do it? Sleep is also generally the domain of Mind, so maybe a competent Mastigos would have some sort of defense. No idea how this translates to oWoD though. I just want to believe that my favorite gameline is able to do something about some of these apocalypse scenarios.
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Aug 30, 2016 10:05
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Changeling's ToJ options are all pretty safe for humanity with that one exception, now I've finished my read of them. I'm going to adopt the 5-tier model for this afterall, since to put most of the Changeling ones on the same level as other splats doesn't really work well. Tier 0 is the base and is 'no, or extremely minor, impact on humanity'. The basic level of impact, if the loss of creativity is in play, is a Tier 1. Humanity loses its ability to innovate, and there may be some collateral damage as human beings are caught up in the intrigues of King Meilge seizing power and ushering in Winter. Presumably, depression and anxiety levels will increase and there may be a rise in suicide rates, but this is a secondary impact. The real danger of these scenarios is creative sterility. If human beings can no longer invent new things or innovate or change their ways substantially, then with our current world situation energy-wise we'll suffer an economic and political collapse within a century and a half. That's on the cards for us in real life, but we have the edge of being able to create. Take it away, add the overpopulation of the World of Darkness, and the collapse happens sooner and it happens harder. But it's a knock-on effect, not triggered by the supernatural so much as by mankind's own failings. The scenarios themselves, though... We already discussed Gods and Monsters, which is written as the most powerful and impactful ending. Depending on how one reads it, it's either Tier 1 (magic sleep without consequences at all), Tier 2 (Magic sleep with only indirect consequences - the industrial crisis, etc), or Tier 3 (magic sleep with full consequences, where something like 25 - 75% of the human race never wakes up, civilization shatters into pieces, and no matter who wins we collapse to a 19th century or earlier lifestyle with the attendant die-offs, famines, and plagues.) It's intended to be a 2 - human beings will die but it's from the direct impact of inanimae raising the Rocky Mountains to do battle - but with a rational look at the consequences of humanity universally passing out for a week it quickly becomes a far greater calamity. The second scenario, Pick Your Poisons, has science triumph over dreams. This is a silly concept to begin with - most scientists are in fact profound dreamers who chase the ineffable and the unknowable with a deep and sincere passion, especially people they sneer at like astrophysicists and mathematicians - but let's accept it as an idea. If creative sterility is in effect, it's tier 1. If not, it's tier zero as there are no direct deaths, losses, or suffering caused by the fae dying away. No great battles, no fae curses smiting the entire nation of Belize, etc. The changelings die, but everyone else trucks on along exactly the same way they did a day, a month, a year before. It ties in nicely with a Weaver/Technocracy victory option for the other lines. The third scenario, The Great Purge, is fun. It's a tier 0 event on its own. The Tuatha de Danaan return to earth to slaughter the changelings for being perversions of both fae and mortal kind. At most, there's some small scale turmoil as the number of mysterious deaths spikes and some power vacuums arise, but there is no actual impact on humanity whatsoever as written other than being afraid for a while and not knowing why. If the Tuatha don't stop with the changelings and begin remaking reality, though, it could quickly escalate to a 3 or 4. The fourth scenario, the Starlight Exodus, has even less impact. The changelings gently caress off back to Arcadia. It isn't even tier zero, because it isn't an apocalypse at all. It's a new beginning for the changelings in a world of enchantment and wonder, even if getting there means the painful loss of emotional bonds to the earthly world. For humanity, winter settles in, but that's inevitable in any season-based cosmology and does not directly harm human beings. The most impact is, again, power vacuums and mysterious disappearances causing people to have unresolved issues and a need for therapy. Changeling is pretty much the softest hitting set of apocalypses. None of the other lines have one that boils down to 'we go home and all is well'. They all (nearly, anyway - Hunter doesn't) have one that leads to the total extinction of the human race, save Changeling. Just like the game was always a bit disconnected from the rest of the lines, it's end-of-days is tonally distinct and far less bleak.
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Aug 30, 2016 11:19
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Go into the Hunter ToJ stuff; I am honestly curious.
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Aug 30, 2016 11:24
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Well, pending a full read through of it, Hunter endings are either dark but hopeful or just plain dark. The intro fiction for it alone sets out a world in which there's a new middle eastern war based around the Gulf, millions of people dying in Mumbai, an army coup against the President and nuclear bombs going off in Israel and in LA. Lucifer turns up with his black cathedral, the sun may or may not disappear, and there's massive strife globally. One scenario is all about the Imbued rallying to fight against the creatures of the night. It gets real ugly, society totally collapses, and monsters assume direct control of world governments now that the cat's out of the bag. The imbued might win. They might not. Either way, the masquerade crumbles and everything is hosed. The second is more positive. Society begins to break down, but so do the rules. Monsters can be healed and made human, turned into allies. Eventually, that can't be done anymore, but the hunters might have been able to make the world a better place - or at least cobbled together a world from the ashes of the old one that isn't fundamentally and horrifically broken and corrupt on every level. The third is all about the imbued bringing humanity to the forefront and leading a revolution against the dark powers. Paradox and similar barriers fade away as humans begin to believe, which means that mages become far more dangerous to fight. It ends with either abject failure or a glorious global revolution of the mundane human against the supernatural tyrants that have oppressed and butchered them from the shadows for millennia. None of them is below tier 2. They all have the potential to be tier 3, though none feature the potential for the total (or near-total) extinction of the human race. Thanks to the Changeling thing, I'm now watching Life After People and reading the book it's based on. When I do the full write up of that event it's going to be detailed and very bleak, and the amount of googling for industrial plants etc might well have me on a new watchlist or two. Loomer fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Aug 30, 2016 |
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Aug 30, 2016 11:56
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My favorite ToJ that I can remember was the Mage one where the Nefandi win and reality is this weird freaky nightmare realm where anything is possible but nothing can be really relied upon. Cut one tree and it bleeds, cut another and it bursts into flame, cut a third and you sprout leaves, etc.
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Aug 31, 2016 01:42
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Yawgmoth posted:My favorite ToJ that I can remember was the Mage one where the Nefandi win and reality is this weird freaky nightmare realm where anything is possible but nothing can be really relied upon. Cut one tree and it bleeds, cut another and it bursts into flame, cut a third and you sprout leaves, etc. Sounds like Marauder victory rather than Nephandi.
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Aug 31, 2016 03:29
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I'll do a proper little write-up on the rest of the ToJ book's scenarios soon, but while I'm reading it I just have to note how disappointing the Mummy options are. I always forget them when I go through my mental list of oWoD apocalypse options, and that's because of the four scenarios, three can be stopped. Not partly mitigated or made a slightly better outcome for mankind by the PCs struggles, but outright stopped. It's tonal whiplash with the rest of the book where the only good outcome most of the time is a good death that nets you some privileged position with God/The Celestial Emperor/Lucifer/Whoever, or where you and your loved ones survive while all else goes to poo poo. Mummy though? Nah gently caress it, let's call the whole thing off!
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Aug 31, 2016 03:31
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Loomer posted:Thanks to the Changeling thing, I'm now watching Life After People and reading the book it's based on. When I do the full write up of that event it's going to be detailed and very bleak, and the amount of googling for industrial plants etc might well have me on a new watchlist or two. Your posts about the occult have given me the impression that somewhere in Quantico ᴛʜᴇ ᴘʀᴏᴊᴇᴄᴛ is included in a file right next to Jack Parsons'.
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Aug 31, 2016 03:31
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That's one hell of a compliment. I think. Moving to the review and recap of scenarios. First on the chopping block is Demon, which is fantastic for illustrating the tonal difference between Changeling and other lines. In Demon, no matter which scenario plays out mankind is pretty much hosed. The single best spot to be in in the World of Darkness is one where the Changeling's fourth path plays out. One of the worst places to be is in a Demon endgame. In the intro fiction, which I tend to treat as applying to every scenario, things are bad. The gulf stream is shutting down, flesh-eating locusts are swarming Russia and Europe, domestic extremism and terror attacks ramp up, the Indonesian polyvulcanic vent begins to go (presumably that's Ijen, but it could be all of Indonesia's volcanos) and an airborne filovirus hits the middle east. A filovirus is bad poo poo - it's the family of virii Ebola belongs to, and this one is also very lethal. So, not a good start for anyone. In the first scenario, Twilight of the Gods, the Earthbound make a pact and subvert world governments. There's massive crackdowns and governments get very, very ugly in how they handle 'anti-terror' operations, which happen to be aimed at the Fallen. All out war between the Falle and the Earthbound breaks out, which is as destructive as you'd image. Lots of military involvement, lots of powerful rituals, and by the time the smoke clears, humanity is nearly extinct no matter who wins. The best case scenario here is that a humanist faction of reconcilers or faustians come out the ultimate victors, but they rule over a broken world full of corpses and ash. Tier 3 by definition. In the second scenario, Better to Rule on Earth, the Fallen manage to summon Greater demons - the real barons and overlords - into the world to battle the Earthbound. They do battle, it happens publicly, and mankind is forced to believe and take sides. Some stuff happens, the Fallen create a new bastion by raising an island in Polynesia (hey, I hope someone thought to warn the neighbours of the massive loving tsunami headed their way!), which the Earthbound attack. Cue a world war between the Fallen and the Earthbound, culminating in the use of nuclear weapons and powerful rituals. At best, humanity is only nearly extinct, and that's only if the greatest demons are summoned and bound. Otherwise, everyone loving dies. Also tier 3. Paradise Won is the third scenario, and on paper should be the best for humanity. Lucifer himself takes the reins of mankind, provokes the Earthbound into a fight, and coerces many Fallen into serving him. so far, so good. But then the Earthbound hit harder and hit many cities with their various lores, causing all out pandemonium, massive earthquakes, huge storms, etc. Not so good. Then, Lucifer and Belial throw down in Los Angeles and over a week of fighting completely destroy the city. If even a third of the population is still there for the fighting (and since Lucifer built a new gehinnom there, it's probably higher) then they just killed three million people. This is when it gets ugly. The Earthbound deploy chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. That's expected of them, they're supervillains. Lucifer does the same thing. Between them, they kill billions of people - at least a third of humanity on the low end. Lucifer builds a new, totalitarian society, defeats the Earthbound, and then institutes a violent mass purge of the Fallen who fought for him and their thralls, with many public executions. At best, Lucifer wins and makes a bright new world of the ashes, but it's a bright new world ruled by a tyrant king who slaughtered billions. At worst, he gets killed. Then mankind finishes his purges, but slowly dies away in a radioactive wasteland as they lack the tools to repair it themselves. It's a tier 3 too. Every single Demon outcome in the book is tier 3. It's the single most horrifying set of scenarios because no matter what, nearly everyone dies and the world is ruined. It's ugly, it's spiteful, it's vicious, and I love it because I loved Demon and as an Australian I am constitutionally required to have a hard-on for anything that leads to Mad Maxing. Also, it leads into the Rapture's Delight episode of American Dad, which is an automatic ten points from me. We already did Hunter, but a few words on those scenarios. None of them has anything approaching the level of detail of the others, because they gave about a third of their pagecount to various 'in setting' documents at the start. Now, I personally love those as flavour and for the Project, and they did it pretty nicely. Millions die, it's armageddon, etc. But in terms of a useable game product, it was a loving dreadful decision because they end up spending maybe ten pages discussing the scenarios - half of which have big blocks of art on them - and then more pages repeating the advice given everywhere else. Each chapter includes a whole section on storytelling the end, which is a good idea - but they repeat like, 2/3rds of the content from each other because most of it is good general advice for it. It should have gotten its own chapter and freed up space for more meaningful content, while individual scenario ST notes could remain where they are. For instance, you don't need to be told five times that you should wrap up the PCs stories and give them a sense of conclusion. You definitely don't need to be told that with two or three paragraphs every time. Hunter kind of got the short stick in its scenarios. The level of detail I gave for them is... Well, it's pretty much all there is about those scenarios, just summed up in a couple of sentences. On one hand, that's good - it puts all the agency in player and ST hands. On the other, half of the fun of these is having four or five detailed scenarios to give you ideas, and there's a big middle ground between 'absolute railroad bullshit' like some of Gehenna's or the Mummy ones, and 'a vague sketch done in kahlua on a crumpled cocktail napkin of what happens' like Hunter got. Moving on. Kindred of the East. These scenarios are, to their credit, pretty decent. The problem is that like most KotE stuff, they make my eyes glaze over a lot due to a combination of orientalism and bad aping of Eastern styles. The unifying factor for them is the Sixth Age comes, which is inevitable in KotE and sort of had to happen. The first scenario, Rising of One Hundred Clouds, sees the spirit world calcify and the shroud thicken to where elder kuei-jin get trapped on the other side and can no longer subsist on ambient chi. They have to drink blood again. Worse, lots of them vanish - either trapped in the spirit world, killing themselves, or being dragged to hell because they were secretly akuma. No more kuei-jin will ever be created, and the world spirals into darkness - only it doesn't seem to, or at least no real detail on that spiral is given for this scenario. It's tier 1, as it really only impacts on the Kuei-jin, but it has a nice poetic quality to it and I actually didn't mind the scenario too much. The second scenario, Serpent Bites the Hand, is the one with Oliver Thrace being a mean little oval office and serving the Yama Kings. This is a Bad Thing as it leads to virtually all the Kuei-jin being wiped out and sent straight to Yomi, Broken Mirrors appearing in pretty much every Tremere chantry, and the Tremere becoming a clan of akuma. The combination of these factors sees the world go to poo poo as Yomi's energy seeps into the real world through all those mirrors, causing riots, wars, and general brutality. The Camarilla collapses into a second Anarch Revolt. It isn't pretty, but it gets worse. The Yama Kings invade with their hordes of demons, killing millions, and battle with each other over who will reign as Demon Emperor. Depending on how that goes down, this is either Tier 2 (if the Yama Kings are too busy fighting each other to really gently caress up mankind) or Tier 3 (if one takes a clear victory and turns his baleful eye on mankind.) It's very metaplot and it isn't very good, to be honest. It seems like the sort of poo poo Etrius would fly into a rage over and snap some necks. For that matter, Tremere is walking around and he might have a word or two to say about his clan again taking a bargain for a fate worse than death. Not to mention Saulot should pop up here, since this scenario hinges on the Kindred doing poo poo, to make his bid for the role of Demon Emperor. It'd nicely tie up that plotline while making for a more interesting scenario. Up next, Trumpet of Mount Meru. The Shih get a big boost of power. They rally everyone to their cause and kill the Kuei-jin, then probably die themselves fighting off the advancing Yama Kings. That's about it. Depending on how one views the Sixth Age, this is either a 1 or a 2. As a 1, it only really impacts on the Kuei-jin even with humanity getting involved. As a 2, the Sixth Age comes with all that it entails, but not as a result of this scenario. It just... Happens, and to be honest I'm not that inclined to count what passes for a natural event for scoring a scenario. Last for KotE, the Wicked City. This one is kind of cool in an anime way. Mikaboshi forces the Yomi realm closer and closer to the mortal realm, spreading Broken Mirrors. Then, he forces his realm through the mirrors and turns all cities into his personal kingdom and becomes Demon Emperor pretty much by default. There's tremendous amounts of fighting between his forces (including Strike Force Zero) and the Kuei-jin and shen, but he ultimately wins and turns the entire planet into one continuous city of misery. It's a tier 2 or 3, though I'd put it at 3 as it destroys the world as we know it and life will exist only so it can be tortured by Mikaboshi. Pretty bleak, but it makes me remember Vampire Hunter D for some reason. And now where things fall apart. Mummy. Where three out of four apocalypses are intended to be prevented. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but in a book where the apocalypse is presented as unavoidable everywhere else, it doesn't quite fit in. But then Mummy never quite fit in either. The scenarios, at least, are kind of interesting, though as written they're railroady pieces of poo poo you wouldn't want to be a player in. In the common points, there's a rain of frogs and locusts on Egypt, the death of the firstborn, war in the middle east, unexplained eclipses, etc. It's all reposts and new perspectives on stuff from the Time of Judgment ticker, which I strongly dislike. The other lines reference material from the ticker (and vice versa) but don't dedicate wordcount to repeating it, let alone three pages. About the only interesting thing is viewing all this in connection with Orpheus, where everything becomes linked to a real apocalypse, the rise of Grandmaw (and like Mummy, Orpheus permits the apocalypse to end - or rather, to be postponed indefinitely. It just does so a lot better.) Apophis Ascends is the first timeline. Apophis becomes a quasi-mummy with a Risen wraith (who was meant to become an Amenti but refused) named Eurydice. No, Eurydice has never appeared in connection with Mummy before. She is given no history or background or motivation other than wanting to be resurrected. While one could forge a link between her and the Isle of Eurydice (or the mythical namesake of them both), it's never stated and most Mummy players probably weren't too versed on the finest details of the Wraith setting. You could link her to the Lady of Fate if you wanted, but the LoF is meant to be Eve and nothing she does here would fit other than being tempted by a snake, I guess. Anyway. Apophis stalks and eats the Apepnu in Eurydice's body, and when he eats enough of them, he begins to tear the Shroud open and combine the netherworld with reality. The PCs are meant to go stop him from completing this, which is a problem because then... The apocalypse is over, keep on with the campaign? Truly a time of great judgment. If a plucky group of mummies stops Apophis, this is tier 0. It causes some panic and chaos, but doesn't even wipe out the splat in question. If they don't, then it's Tier 4 as Apophis unmakes the entire world. Get used to those variable tiers for mummy - 3 out of 4 scenarios have them. The Way Goes Westward is one of two scenarios that hinge on the non-Egyptian mummies. It starts with the city of Sao Paolo bursting into flames one night, killing and displacing millions. There's no mention of the big impact of this, but let's spend a moment here. Sao Paolo is reduced completely to rubble. That's bad. Brazil's economy (and with it, much of South America and ultimately the world) just went straight into the shitter. The city has the 10th highest GDP of any city in the world and is 10% of the entire national GDP for Brazil. But that's all - it's a firestorm scenario. The flames are specified to be white hot. That means generally the flames are very hot. There's going to be a lot of energy released, and a lot of smoke, and a spreading wildfire through the surrounding landscape that could go on for quite some time as the fires burn supernaturally for three days. Three days will change wind and scatter burning debris all over. Three days will cause big storms to develop over the region, with no rain but a great deal of thunder and dry air. Three days will also cause a temperature drop in surrounding regions. Picture Fort McMurray's impact, but bigger. There's a lot of fuel around Sao Paolo, so more than just the city is going to burn. But, back to the actual scenario. The fire is caused by an angry bunch of mummies taking revenge. Cue a big ol' railroady adventure to stop them. Unfortunately, by the time the PCs do, Brazil's shroud has collapsed and flaming spectres have swarmed the living, most of them birthed in the mass murder of the people of Sao Paolo. Presumably, this starts even more fires as the spectres can interact with the physical world and are, and I can't stress this enough, on fire. Within a day, there's a colossal spiritual blast as the Pit of Names is tainted by the bad spiritual energy of the mass murder, shattering the Shroud more or less permanently around Sao Paolo. So that's Sao Paolo now. A smouldering ruin of refugee camps where the fire keeps spontaneously restarting because of its spiritual echo, and where flaming ghosts scream through the air starting even more fires and murdering human beings. Unless the PCs are succesful, the shroud collapses everywhere and everyone dies as life cannot sustain itself with the shroud gone. Tier 2 if the PCs stop the bad mummies, Tier 4 if they don't. Third is the Asian mummy ending, which is the arrival of the Sixth Age like the KotE stuff. More or less the same thing happens as in the Wicked City so far as the mortal world is concerned, only the world's chi becomes irreversibly tainted. The asian mummies stand up to fight until the last against the Demon emperor, but lose. Some survive because their job is to safeguard knowledge, not die fighting. Tier 2 for its individual impact, but depending on which yama king takes over, tier 3. It's least interesting of the options, but is the only one not presented as a 'bad thing happen, you stop' deal and is thematically consistent with the KotE stuff, so it's acceptable. Last one! 'Long Day's Journey into Night' sees Eurydice pop up again (gently caress you, Eurydice. They should have used John Carpenter instead, since he was already a wyrm-bitten, corrupt spectre son-of-a-bitch risen thirsting for Resurrection, who outright went and attacked the Amenti to try and get it. There's emotional investment and even attachment to him from both Wraith, Hunter and Mummy players, and unlike Eurydice, he has actual motives, history, and a purpose. This is pretty much a retread of the 'shroud weakening' motif of the first and second scenarios. Eurydice uses the MAelstrom to bite and tear the shroud open and mass chaos erupts due to the ghostly activity. The PCs are strung along by powerful NPCs into doing their bidding, and go off and sacrifice themselves in the underworld to save the world. This one, at least, wipes out all the mummies if they manage it, combining them into an impenetrable new Shroud and in the process cutting off everyone from the lands of the dead. If they don't, well, Apophis is back and the shroud is gone, so take the endings for 1 and 2 together. Either Apophis kills everything or the laws of the cosmos fundamentally change with the collapse of the shroud, so it's a Tier 4 ending if the sacrifice doesn't work and a tier 1 if it does. None of them have nearly as bleak a set of unintended consequences as The Sleep had, though god help you if you're a mortal in a demon or kuei-jin endgame.
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Aug 31, 2016 06:24
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First, are any of the scenarios mutually compatible enough to guess at a "canon" end like the novels for the core three lines gave? Secondly, my favorite word filter vastly improves that first Kuei-Jin scenario. Rising of One Hundred Butts 
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Aug 31, 2016 08:42
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Kavak posted:First, are any of the scenarios mutually compatible enough to guess at a "canon" end like the novels for the core three lines gave? For Demon, the 'canon' ending is actually in the book as is. Lucifer starts his great government, but does so with the Fallen rather than against them, and then permits himself to be butchered by one of his underlings in an act of 'treachery'. Very neat vibes of the Gospel of Judas in that Lucifer was obeying God when he revolted, as Judas obeyed Christ in his gospel, followed by a true self-sacrifice. He does so after arming his forces with a spirit-nuke, though, so presumably it slides into the same Tier 3 apocalypse as the rest. With Hunter, all the endings are compatible but there's not enough information to really move forward and make a real guess. But with the interstitial text, we know Lupe is leading active armed resistance in Chicago (which is strange, as Lupe is dead. Either she came back or something is wearing her skin to lead the fighting there), LA's been nuked, Lucifer's Gehinnom has appeared, and the US has invaded Qatar. From that we can probably assign Hunter to the Lucifer ending of Demon (whichever one we take; either Judas-Lucifer or Mad King Lucifer), which fits with how Lucifer created the Imbued. Or didn't. This is one of those areas Demon itself is extremely contradictory about, let alone Hunter's answers to that question. For the others, not really. For KotE we can say with certainy that the apocalypse sees the coming of the Sixth Age and the rise of the Demon Emperor, because those two things can't be stopped and happen in all 4 scenarios either on or off-screen (e.g. in 1 and 3, we don't find out who becomes Emperor, but it's treated as a certainty it will eventually happen) which means that if we really wanted, we could tie it in with the Lucifer ending as well. The prophecy is correct - there's a Demon Emperor (Lucifer) and the world has been reduced to a pitiable state (the Sixth Age or 'Age of Sorrows'.) It's just that the exact details weren't what they expected. Of the four actually presented, 1, 2 and 4 are all pretty compatible. The Kuei-Jin dwindle away and then begin to die en masse, and Mikaboshi (who is revealed in the ticker entries to be making his move) leads his armies into the world to seize the throne as Demon Emperor. Not as fun as Lucifer walking over and destroying him as just another mad demon, but probably how a definitive canon ending would have gone down. For mummy, no idea, but mummy was always loving nuts. Of the options, Apophis succeeding and shredding the shroud is the most likely. It also dovetails rather nicely with Orpheus in that respect, save that Grandmaw is a great and unknowably vast cosmic entity while Apophis is Oblivion/the Wyrm in a small capacity. Both of them being Oblivion personified though means that to fit them together one version would need to take primacy, as Grandmaw having an avatar kind of defeats the point of what she is. Changeling has a canon ending that's treated as a scenario, but which I treat as the backdrop to the other three. Meilge's plot works and he tortures High King David into submission, making him pass the throne legitimately (via Caliburn) to his wife, Faerilith. Then Meilge tortures him until he goes mad and unleashes him to kill Faerilith, at which point Meilge demands justice for his slain niece and has High King David killed by his champion. At that point, Meilge becomes High King and quietly works to usher in Winter so that he can seize control over Concordia and the world by exploiting people's fear.
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Aug 31, 2016 08:59
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Is there a canonical ending for God45? I was always rooting for something nasty to happen to him.
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Aug 31, 2016 09:10
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Not to my knowledge, no. It may happen in one of the Hunter action-rpgs, but it doesn't appear in any of the books. Those games are likely to remain a blind spot in the project unless someone has a good video LP of them that goes into every scene and has a good, unobscured view and audio. I'm probably never going to play them. Not only is their hardware aging but I don't have the patience for that kind of game.
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Aug 31, 2016 09:20
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Right and Wrong was some of the best fiction work they ever did, and right at the end raises a ton of questions about the Demon setting, which is fitting for a story that ends with two seconds to go and Lucifer having no idea what to do. Hell, even if you don't care about any of the game lines in Time of Judgement it's just a nice read.
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Aug 31, 2016 16:41
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Revisiting the Big Sleep changeling scenario (gently caress the official name, from now on it's The Big Sleep since that's the real apocalyptic event of the scenario) a little. If Life After People and the book its loosely based off is even close to accurate (which isn't necessarily the case, but I'm not in a hurry to google 'how long does it take an oil refinery to catch on fire if everyone goes missing' or 'oil refinery explosion how to'), oil refineries might start to go kaboom within hours. There about 700 oil refineries around the world - not sure how many there were in 2004 but let's just go with the same figure since this is for the sake of the argument. Only human beings in very dangerous circumstances get a chance to come to a slow halt before dozing off. Presumably, guys sitting behind a control panel don't count, so they're effectively unmanned. If there's a 1% chance each hour of one of those refineries encountering a major problem, then by the end of the 7 days it is all but certain that at least a few will encounter difficulty. I don't do probabilities despite enjoying nerdgames, but if anyone wants to it might be interesting. We'll assume anyway, for a conservative standpoint, that 5% of those refineries go kaboom. That's 35 oil refineries worldwide that are gone (others will be damaged), which is Very Bad. Anywhere linked to those refineries by pipeline is also going to go Boom, which means a frightening number of tanks full of volatile petrochemicals and byproducts. Enormous clouds of poison gas will follow from the fires, and the particulates are going to cause localized artificial winters and major storms. Those particulates will carry tremendous amounts of heavy metals and environmental toxins with them, and since man is asleep, no one is there to stop the fires or the gas releases. This then triggers wildfires, and where refineries are hooked into transnational pipelines or gas works and their pipelines, there could be many, many thousands of fires and explosions from each of those refineries. Unless the changelings take a break from their climactic battle - and they might just do that - when mankind wakes up, if they wake up, they're returning to a world with major ecological and economic trouble. Extremely toxic chemicals have dispersed across continents, major water sources and oceans are contaminated, and cities with major oil industries may very well be... Well, gone, burned up by the fires started by explosions and leaks. That's cities like Los Angeles, Delaware, Baton Rouge, Detroit, Buenos Aires, Cairo, and Mumbai. It isn't an understatement to say that unless Changelings take action on this specific issue while humanity is out for the count, tens or even hundreds of millions of people will die in the ensuing blasts, fires, and gas clouds. That's not even considering the long term impacts of the toxic release or the major economic and ecological disruption to society such refinery failures will cause.
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Aug 31, 2016 18:29
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Loomer posted:If there's a 1% chance each hour of one of those refineries encountering a major problem, then by the end of the 7 days it is all but certain that at least a few will encounter difficulty. I don't do probabilities despite enjoying nerdgames, but if anyone wants to it might be interesting.
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Aug 31, 2016 19:36
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As long as you're magically putting almost all of humanity into a week-long slumber, it doesn't seem like a stretch (and indeed would suit Dreaming pretty well) to say that all complex machinery simply "falls asleep" as well. What could be more Banal than the apocalyptic battle between good and evil being overshadowed by a mundane ecological catastrophe?
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Aug 31, 2016 19:42
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Kellsterik posted:As long as you're magically putting almost all of humanity into a week-long slumber, it doesn't seem like a stretch (and indeed would suit Dreaming pretty well) to say that all complex machinery simply "falls asleep" as well. What could be more Banal than the apocalyptic battle between good and evil being overshadowed by a mundane ecological catastrophe? That's one way to handle it, and probably closer to how the authors envisaged it. I'm personally digging the idea of the nockers and mannikins rallying to keep the industrial situation from spiralling into hell while trolls and sidhe have their dumb dreams of glory accidentally causing an extinction threatening event.
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Aug 31, 2016 20:03
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Yawgmoth posted:There's 168 hours in a week, so that would be a 99% chance everything stays fine. 0.99^168 = 0.1848 (rounded off), so you've got an 18.48% chance that everything stays fine the whole week, or an 82.52% chance of poo poo going wrong. This assumes that we're considering "oil refineries" as a single group and "oh poo poo" is a single event; if you want to consider all 700 as independent 1% chances then you have to go deeper. You also have to consider that even if things go wrong at these facilities, there tend to be some level of automatic safeguards to keep oil rigs exploding and power plants from melting down. IIRC Most Nuclear Reactors have automated SCRAM systems that can activate even if nobody is around to push The Oh poo poo Button. Even if you have several failures of oil rigs/refineries, very few are going to catastrophically explode and will rather instead probably seize up or break in a way that could be later repaired. If that after humans thing is right, you've got about 3 reliable days before the power grid goes kaput anyways and once backup generators are depleted most other facilities will go to sleep. If you've got Dragons and Trolls around blowing poo poo up for shits and giggles however...
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Aug 31, 2016 20:10
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At the same time, oWoD safety standards are probably lower and facilities less well maintained. I'm also not sure on the oil refineries - my info is largely coming from The World Without Us, and there's not a tremendous amount of information presented in it about them specifically. Most nuke plants will be fine after seven days. The danger zone there is not the reactors, but spent fuel containment ponds. Those rely on constant circulation of coolant water and some, apparently, are designed to rely on outside power or emergency backup. Depending on when the grid goes down, and how long the backup lasts, seven days might be just long enough for the worst designed or maintained (or Pentex-built) ponds to boil down and the rods to ignite. EDIT: Revisiting Mummy's South American scenario, things are worse than I thought. The book specifies only Sao Paolo as being burnt. That's pretty bad in and of itself - but Sao Paolo has a larger metropolitan megaregion of more-or-less unbroken development around it, containing some 30 million people and four major oil refineries. While this scenario has humans able to intervene with the fires to a degree, for a minimum of five days there is an unstoppable firestorm (and for two of those days, flaming spectres screaming through the sky every night) with a fire service specified as unfit for the challenge. So that's going to be a very, very bad combination - even if the fires don't impact on the refineries (possible, as the specified area of the initial magic blast is only the city and not the broader metropolitan area) there's going to be disruption of not 1/10th of Brazil's economy, but closer to a quarter. If the flaming spectres screaming through the sky do ignite fuel storage, refineries, or fertilizer and sugar plants (both of which are in the region) then there's going to be vastly more damage. It's an event that's probably going to cause a global financial crisis. Loomer fucked around with this message at 09:54 on Sep 1, 2016 |
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Aug 31, 2016 20:22
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Yo Loomer every time you talk about The Project this is what I picture you as, like the House of Leaves guy but with RPG books from the 90s. But seriously, is Time of Judgement seems so hit-or-miss with the resolutions. Doesn't Caine and Abel both battle in the VTM scenario while the PCs chill in a church?
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Sep 1, 2016 19:47
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The church scenario, IIRC, has nothing in it except the church. No giant battles or anything, because the focus is on the PCs in the church.
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Sep 1, 2016 20:00
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My biggest issues with the end time books is the fact that I tend to play low power, street level games. What could my 14th generation caitiff do in a game where NYC just up and walks away because [Tzimisce] got bored and wanted to move elsewhere?
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Sep 1, 2016 21:50
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For awhile I was thinking of doing a game where a good chunk of the apocalypses happened and the PCs would be humans trying to seek out remnants of the occult left in the world to survive.
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Sep 1, 2016 21:57
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Mugrim's famous PbP linked in the OP is more or less that scenario. I wish he ran more games because that guy really Gets It w/r/t Mortals. I wish I'd had enough patience not to overcook the Twin Peaks-inspired game that I was in, it was some wild poo poo. Ran a few of my own that were basically tributes but they didn't go far.
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Sep 2, 2016 02:53
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The Demon endgame in the Time of Judgment book is actually less hosed than the end times setup as presented in Days of Fire, the Book of Nod analogue for DtF. First, in a literal nod to VtM's "Last Daughter of Eve" eschatology, the entire human race spontaneously stops conceiving baby girls, which would already be apocalyptic on its own merits. And second, scientists realize that the speed of light is actually slightly faster than previously measured, and then remeasure it to make sure and find that it's actually even faster than that - as it turns out, the speed of light is actually accelerating, and is doing so at a rate that would result in every subatomic particle in the universe exploding in about six months' time. This isn't presented in DoF as prophecy of things that might happen, but as the current state of events in the lead-up to the Time of Judgment endgame.
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Sep 2, 2016 03:09
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