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Count loving Dracula's intro music is "Dragula" or I DDOS the site. 
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Sep 16, 2016 02:15
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Pope Guilty posted:I'm hearing something to the effect that paradox said at grand masquerade that they want vampire to tackle darker subjects like sex trafficking, and made disapproving reference to the Mind's eye society banning that kind of thing from mes games. Anybody know anything? This blew up to the point that I heard about it and so four of the national organizations that were present at Grand Masquerade had a meeting with By Night Studios and then released a joint statement to the effect of "the greater Vampire LARP community are unified to politically and politely tell White Wolf to go gently caress themselves and get your poo poo right". The session where things were said were video-taped and yet have not been released, however there are many saying that there was a heated conversation and all are waiting for the tape to be released before saying what they remember being said.
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Sep 16, 2016 02:20
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I'm stuck using WWE 2k16's stock music options until I figure out how to hack custom songs in, so he's using Triple H's music.
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Sep 16, 2016 02:21
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Incidentally, I am gonna do a stream of WRESTLING OF DARKNESS now.
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Sep 16, 2016 02:29
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Kellsterik posted:I'm running Awakening 2E and could use some advice from people familiar with the Astral in either edition.
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Sep 16, 2016 02:53
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Gerund posted:This blew up to the point that I heard about it and so four of the national organizations that were present at Grand Masquerade had a meeting with By Night Studios and then released a joint statement to the effect of "the greater Vampire LARP community are unified to politically and politely tell White Wolf to go gently caress themselves and get your poo poo right". Y'all got links to discussion threads about this, or the statement itself? I kinda wanna read it.
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Sep 16, 2016 03:43
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Wrestling of Darkness has ended for the night! Mother Damnable and the Unholy get in an argument after Mother Damnable wins a match, and are now officially enemies. Carl the fishman gets an upset win in a triple threat. Bishop Birch takes down the Count in a surprise victory after pulling off a tombstone piledriver. See y'all next week! e: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGRd2lElFTs - and this'll be the show, once it finishes processing. Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Sep 16, 2016 |
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Sep 16, 2016 04:16
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Daeren posted:Y'all got links to discussion threads about this, or the statement itself? I kinda wanna read it. MES exists entirely on loving listservs in tyool 2016 and I am part of a tiny minority that occasionally gets noisy about it before inertia sets in. The people whose opinion really matters have been using the lists since 199whatever and don't see why an unsearchable, unlinkable, impossible to reference email list, that basically exists in closed archives and people's email accounts, could be improved on. Other than "it looks less suspicious at work than a forums url" and "it's basically impossible to unpublish things once said" I don't know why they love them so.
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Sep 16, 2016 04:57
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God bless you, Rattus, for your crazy vampwrestlemania..
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Sep 16, 2016 05:24
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Gerund, were any of these orgs from Scandinavia?
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Sep 16, 2016 05:26
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Count loving Dracula is clearly coasting on his name, and Birch is a scrapper. Right outcome.
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Sep 16, 2016 05:28
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Pope Guilty posted:MES exists entirely on loving listservs in tyool 2016 and I am part of a tiny minority that occasionally gets noisy about it before inertia sets in. The people whose opinion really matters have been using the lists since 199whatever and don't see why an unsearchable, unlinkable, impossible to reference email list, that basically exists in closed archives and people's email accounts, could be improved on. Other than "it looks less suspicious at work than a forums url" and "it's basically impossible to unpublish things once said" I don't know why they love them so. I had this exact same argument with the MES Requiem branch a couple of years ago when I suggested that, at the very least, the local-only chat for the lower-down peons could get moved to a forum. I was told no, even if the forum was totally voluntary. When I asked how I was supposed to catch up on something like four years of conversation on a bunch of disconnected and frankly disorganized email lists that would make Yahoo Groups seems downright futuristic I was told that the slow and sometimes painful nature of the email lists was in fact a feature. That without the learning curve people would too quickly digest and integrate stuff into game than would be realistic or fair. I was also told a bunch of other poo poo about how they 'have always worked' and that there's no reason to change it. This happened just before the old chronicle ended when they were planning on rebooting the whole thing, rendering the last X years of email lists moot. I was told they didn't want to move 'midstream' even though there would be no better time to do it.
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Sep 16, 2016 06:28
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I forgot the Blood Auctions of New Orleans. There's a small faction in the city that kidnaps travelling cainites, sires a few caitiff etc, and then sells them to elders who have trouble feeding off humans to serve as feedstock. Delightfully sinister and surprisingly, it didn't come up again in the oWoD except for a similar scenario in the Brujah clan trilogy.
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Sep 16, 2016 07:05
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So what are these bans exactly? No plotlines involving sex trafficking? Just a general guideline to nix edgelord/skeevy PCs who think "gritty realism" is being a sex criminal? Something broader? I mean, I think some restrictions on that stuff is good if only to avoid the cringeworthy bad attempts at "erotic horror" that the old WW attempted, like Eternal Hearts. Or equally cringeworthy attempts at explaining "life on the streets" that were painfully obviously written by white suburban dudes. I'm just not clear if that's the sort of thing the bans were trying to avoid, or if its something else.
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Sep 16, 2016 14:12
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IIRC it was basically "Please don't have rape plots or rape as a significant character background element because that almost always winds up either skeevy or traumatic to those who've experienced it in real life or both."
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Sep 16, 2016 14:38
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unseenlibrarian posted:IIRC it was basically "Please don't have rape plots or rape as a significant character background element because that almost always winds up either skeevy or traumatic to those who've experienced it in real life or both." During game, can you still violently or supernaturally overcome mortals, penetrate them, and inflict unwanted sexual feelings, then kill, intimidate, force addiction on or annihilate their memories so they don't tell on you? Or is Tru:Blood a thing. In seriousness - trigger warnings, fade to blacks, non-skeeve, etc, are all good things - this particular 'no non-consensual themes' I have a hard time wrapping my head around for a vampire game with the Kiss, Blood Bonds and Disciplines. I mean, isn't the whole Bram Stoker shtick kind a rape metaphor? I guess if it works, it works.
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Sep 16, 2016 15:49
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Eh... There's a difference between the subtext and going up to someone else, in person, and saying 'I rape you now.' before proceeding to describe the rape, play rock paper scissors about the rape, and laugh about the rape.
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Sep 16, 2016 16:07
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Also like... 9/10 times the type of person who would want to do a rape plotline is not the guy you want involved in a rape plotline. And that 1/10th usually doesn't come out so good either.
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Sep 16, 2016 16:09
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That all seems reasonable. If "I was embraced against my will" is being treated differently than, "As a mortal, I was forced to be a gigolo" that seems like a fair distinction. And yeah, actively running a rape-specific plotline at a public game is problematic.
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Sep 16, 2016 16:22
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Ironslave posted:Also like... 9/10 times the type of person who would want to do a rape plotline is not the guy you want involved in a rape plotline. And that 1/10th usually doesn't come out so good either. That's been my experience too. Sometimes the person's a skeeve, sometimes its because they think "world of darkness" must include graphic depictions of bad stuff to be "dark". Which WW itself back in the day was guilty of on many occasions. I always think its worth pointing out that things like the Black company series, Fury Road, or Jessica Jones are all in gritty genres (and at least two of which have sexual violence in particular as a major element), but none feel the need to linger over the actual acts to convey their themes.
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Sep 16, 2016 16:56
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I mean the darkness in the world of darkness has always been: OWoD: God exists, and does absolutely nothing about any of this, to the extent that the world is the plaything of monsters and a cavalcade of horrors assail reality because God gives no fucks and happily responded to the first murder by creating a race of parasitic bastards who destroy humanity's hopes from the shadows. The world is fallen, so much so that it probably cannot be saved. The ultimate omnipotent power of the universe has absolutely no concern for your well being and in his place the actors that do care about you are basically all fundamentally hostile. NWoD: There's nothing. The closest thing to God is a weird machine that does weird stuff that no-one understands. The world is shot through with horrors and there are no magic angels waiting to give heroes the power to face them on even terms. You are alone against the universe and whether your life is spent for good or ill is entirely up to you. It's really not about edgy rape but rather the fact that in one the ultimate powers of the universe basically don't give a drat about you at best and are actively hostile and alien at worst, and in the other you are alone to give meaning to your existence as you see fit, with no ultimate cosmic force.
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Sep 16, 2016 17:03
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Ladies and gentlemen, strap yourselves in because it's time to close out the coverage of the End Times with Ascension, the Mage offering. To be blunt, it's as good an end for the game line as you could hope. It alone tries to explain how and why you can have nine different game universes that overlap but are different metaphysically, and to work it into a model that actually creates a semi-satisfactory explanation for why they all get to be king poo poo of their own castle while impacting the other lines. Its scenarios are pretty dope, and other than one, they're all pretty well thought out and pretty well explained. If anyone has questions about the metaphysical ramifications or stuff that isn't covered (to keep it brief(ish) I'm still mostly focusing on the impact on the whole world/cosmos) feel free to ask. First up, the preliminaries from the book that aren't dedicated to any given scenario. There are increasing numbers of rifts in the gauntlet that let weird poo poo come pouring through, like a big rear end spirit that kills sixty people in Albuquerque. So that's bad, but not cataclysmic - it's going to shake up the consensus real good though. There are major disruptions to conventional infrastructure, with power failures and curfews in the Southwest United States. More important? The gauntlet collapses under the weight of the Avatar Storm, so that's cataclysmic. Every mage scenario is tier 4, since basic laws of reality cease to function in every scenario, including the intro fiction. Scenario One is the 'canon' ending (other than the novel, anyway), Judgment. The gauntlet begins to disintegrate as a result of Voormas loving with the realm of Entropy in order to stop the Wheel's inevitable turning. At first, that just means more spiritual incursions, but as it gets worse, large parts begin to fail. 10,000 new mages awaken in the space of a few weeks as a result. The results are predictable - lots and lots of deaths, lots of government and NWO crackdown. A couple of months later, the Middle Gauntlet collapses and lots of angry spirits invade the world. Not everyone dies, but plenty of people meet 'inventive' ends at the hands of weird entities they have no way of comprehending or even really seeing. The Void Engineers gently caress off and run, which also destroys most of man's space infrastructure, but that'd only rank a tier 1 on its own. Much bigger is a one-world government emerging out of the Technocracy, the World Advisory Council, which winds up bombing the poo poo out of many cities to try and suppress the Traditionalist and Orphan resistance. More and more mages awaken during it all. Seven months into the apocalypse, the Shroud is broken. Primordial avatars scream in and hundreds more people awaken daily, while the dead rise en masse and rains of blood, bone and tissue wash over the entire globe. Spooky poo poo right there - you're out repairing a wall for the One World Government and suddenly your truck is being pelted with human teeth, and then the mass grave next to the wall is suddenly full of twitching moaning zombies. After about another month, and many many millions of deaths, an entire tenth of the population awakens. That doesn't really matter in the big scheme of things though, as Voormas manages to gently caress everything up and turns the major shard realms into one contiguous realm, breaking reality and causing every single human being to awaken. So, that's tier 4 - not only is the gauntlet gone, but basic laws of the metaphysical cosmos are rewritten and suddenly, everyone can do magic. Which is bad, because most people are still assholes, and wizards have no sense of right or wrong at the best of times, let alone after enduring a year of incredibly traumatic society-shattering events and technocrat prison camps. Oh, and there's some stuff about a big battle between the Traditions and the Union, which affects something like 50,000 mortal humans. It's a messy scenario, but it's well considered and I'm not doing it justice with this wall of text. Next up, the Technocracy wins. The usual stuff about the gauntlet starting to fail, more spirits breaking through, etc. This time, the Consensus rejects it instead. Paradox grows some big loving teeth, and avatar shards break into the real world to cut people with a high paradox rating to death, like putting them in a blender. Control is fighting for the good side here, against corrupt middle-managers who've hijacked the Technocratic dream. There's actually surprisingly little mortal involvement beyond innocent bystander in this one, until the very end, where there is a non-zero chance that literally everyone dies. Even if the good guys win, magic pretty much dies. If not, everyone lives in a dystopian technocratic hellhole, but that doesn't seem particularly different from real life at this point. Tier 4 since either everything dies or magic dies. Third, we get another asteroid strike scenario, The Earth Will Shake. This one is handled properly, compared to Werewolf's, and it actually is Werewolf's since Rorg does this one too. Only his claw is much, much bigger. There's some mass panic when the asteroid is sighted, but no mundane involvement beyond that until it hits. In the best case scenario, it causes six years of dust clouds hiding the sun, causes massive tsunamis, and lights wildfires the world over. Almost everyone dies. Read Lucifer's Hammer, basically, for this optimistic outcome. If a big bit hits, same poo poo, bigger scale - only everything but the hardiest single celled life dies out. And if a really, really big bit hits, literally everything dies, Australia is flung into space and becomes a new moon, and the rest of the planet is either molten slag or rapidly becoming molten slag. So... Tier 3 in the best case, tier 4 for the rest as a total planterary extinction event counts for tier 4. Four, Aliens Attack. This one needed more work, as it lacks a lot of needed detail and is a bit confusing to read. It is, however, a lot of fun.The paradigm strengthens and paradox grows with it, and reality calcifies. We don't get any sign of mortal involvement other than calls to late night conspiracy radio, so that means Art Bell is having a great week at work when this happens. Well, until the end, in which either the universe dies as most avatars condense into a singularity in another universe (ours gets to die slow, by the way, so it's akin to the Weaver Triumphant option in that it's a total extinction that isn't immediately obvious. Creativity dies, reproduction begins to fail, we Children of Men it, and then basic laws of physics break down) or magic dies outright and doesn't spark a new universe. This is the friendliest option for blurring into a New Mage chronicle, if you wanted to do that for some reason, other than the Novel. Tier 4 any way you cut it. Five, the Nephandi win, which is full of major deviation from the established setting, railroady, and dark. It also is surprisingly unmetal in how its handled, and again has very little consideration for how mortals are affected. However, at one point the Avatar Storm is made manifest in our reality, which is like feeding the entire human race into an industrial blender, so... Not great. The gauntlet dies too, the sky is filled with roiling clouds of ash and fire, and basic concepts like 'friction' become less 'laws' and more... Loose suggestions that rarely, if ever, work once the Unnamed (first of the fallen) takes his victory. Science stops working, as does technology, and only enlightened will functions. We continue to live, but only as slaves for nephandi overlords. Also tier 4, with cosmic constants being torn apart. There's not a lot to write about in terms of unintended impact on humanity. The scenarios either gently caress everyone or don't give enough detail to really say, other than the first one. We could import ideas from other lines of ultimate problems of stuff like reality calcifying, but they aren't actually in the book as written and there's no indication of it. I'll probably still do it for a proper refined write-up, which will include the other two TOJ novels, variants from the MET ToJ book, and the Sons of Ether Mirzaba scenario, but for now, I'm tired so gently caress it.
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Sep 16, 2016 17:18
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The thing that always struck me as dumb about bringing up the worst stuff in Vampire is that Vampire is basically already a metaphor for intimate and/or sexual transgression, it's basically right there in the subtext. It's completely unnecessary (and gross) to go the extra mile to make it specifically about rape and sexual violence. Some of the most effective bits of horror in nWoD has been emotional for me anyway; for instance, there's a scene in one of the Stolze novels where Scratch watches his grand daughter slowly dying from old age and dementia that struck me as pretty horrific, that's the kind of thing that hits close to home for me. Not all horror needs to be some edgelord poo poo to qualify. Also Promethean. Promethean is a great horror game that doesn't need to get into sex-stuff whatsoever to be horrifying, both on the body-horror front and also on the existential front.
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Sep 16, 2016 20:12
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I have taken the time to make full entries for the first 9 wrestlers on my roster (up to Carl). Feel free to check 'em out, either via the dropdown or by clicking on the roster images.
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Sep 16, 2016 20:18
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Daeren posted:Y'all got links to discussion threads about this, or the statement itself? I kinda wanna read it. quote:
These organizations, as I know them, are not centered outside of America. Now we get into the things I don't have the text of. MES, as has been said, is a very old organization with a set structure that has been in place since 199ever. The decision to institute the policy by MES has to do with the way they deal with things and (effectively) don't deal with things, and the other organizations named do not have the MES ban in place as I have heard. However, apparently what was said by an employee of White Wolf pissed off enough people that despite not every org deciding the full shot-across-the-bow ban on 'Rape As A Character Concept', every org has decided that 'consent culture' is something that the hobby as a whole needs to work upon, with or without the support of Swedracula.
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Sep 17, 2016 00:09
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Dang. To get four groups of splintered LARPers to agree, they must have said something truly asinine.
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Sep 17, 2016 00:21
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I know enough about LARP culture/structure as an acquaintance of someone super into it that yeah, getting a response like this is downright impressive in a perverse way. I'm certainly going to want to see that video when it comes out, now.
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Sep 17, 2016 01:02
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It's probably half  , half them being directly insulted.
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Sep 17, 2016 01:30
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Mors Rattus posted:I have taken the time to make full entries for the first 9 wrestlers on my roster (up to Carl). Feel free to check 'em out, either via the dropdown or by clicking on the roster images. Aww yiss. Thinking about it, you need the rest of the Chicago crew to get the full Birch experience. At least Maxwell, Persephone, "Bruise" Miner (already sound like a wrestler name) and good ole' Scratch (maybe as the announcer?).
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Sep 17, 2016 01:38
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I have not yet put enough effort in to get announcers or the desire to redub the audio, so you're gonna have to be happy with noted idiot Jerry Lawler and Michael Cole and the third guy whose name I can never remember.
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Sep 17, 2016 01:40
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Never sub out JR. Never.
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Sep 17, 2016 02:15
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I don't think I can. WWE 2k16 doesn't really allow me to do much of anything with the announcers.
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Sep 17, 2016 02:20
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Pope Guilty posted:The people whose opinion really matters have been using the lists since 199whatever and don't see why an unsearchable, unlinkable, impossible to reference email list, that basically exists in closed archives and people's email accounts, could be improved on. I have a 20 year email archive for a game I haven't attended in 10 years. Moving would be traumatic.
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Sep 17, 2016 02:58
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Mendrian posted:The thing that always struck me as dumb about bringing up the worst stuff in Vampire is that Vampire is basically already a metaphor for intimate and/or sexual transgression, it's basically right there in the subtext. Hence The Rocky Horror Picture Show, to reimagine Dracula with sexual subtext turned into text.
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Sep 17, 2016 02:59
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Loomer posted:rad poo poo I fairly recently finished up running an Ascension game which went down the Judgement path, it was the best of the lot and I really liked that it was able to tie up loads of loose plot threads from the games history - it really rewards people who sperg hard over setting details, but even if nobody gives a poo poo it still presents a ton of stuff to get in the middle of and a villain who can present a very compelling "big ideas" justification for his actions and challenge the players to justify theirs (they are essentially on the same side as the Nephandi when it comes down to it; while he wants to save the world they want to destroy it)
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Sep 17, 2016 03:30
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MonsieurChoc posted:Aww yiss. Trying to find info on Bruise. Where in the book is this person?
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Sep 17, 2016 04:17
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Mors Rattus posted:Trying to find info on Bruise. Where in the book is this person? If memory serves, he's the super new vampire (Gangrel maybe?) from A Hunger Like Fire.
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Sep 17, 2016 04:42
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In case you need more hulking super heavyweights, there's always Tsar Bomba from the Promethean book Saturnine Night! And from the same book, Oleg Wormwood and Aeolipilus are visually fun. e: also La Diabla Blanca from Geist is cool. e2: the archetype of the Teenage Rebel from Astral Realms. Teens are into wrestling, right? Kellsterik fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Sep 17, 2016 |
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Sep 17, 2016 04:56
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If you aren't rooting for Carl at all times you don't deserve to watch him win.
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Sep 17, 2016 05:11
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Grim posted:I fairly recently finished up running an Ascension game which went down the Judgement path, it was the best of the lot and I really liked that it was able to tie up loads of loose plot threads from the games history - it really rewards people who sperg hard over setting details, but even if nobody gives a poo poo it still presents a ton of stuff to get in the middle of and a villain who can present a very compelling "big ideas" justification for his actions and challenge the players to justify theirs (they are essentially on the same side as the Nephandi when it comes down to it; while he wants to save the world they want to destroy it) Yeah. Ascension as a whole is probably the best written of the ToJ books, and Judgment is a really solid scenario that does a great job of tying up a lot of loose threads. Personally, I'd probably run a hybrid Hell on Earth/Judgment option, so that it becomes a very difficult choice for the players. Oppose Voormas fully, and the wheel might still eventually turn, but not without the Nephandi seizing control of reality and polluting. Oppose the Nephandi fully, Voormas wins by default and the universe stops working. Try and stop both is the only answer, but then it becomes a question of stretching too thin, having to rally Craft survivors, rogue technocrats from Ragnarok Command, Orphans, and whoever else they can. It turns the war in Judgment into a much vaster, wider one where the PCs take on the role of the generals and strategists, fighting to make sure that Mus is retaken, redirecting Technocrat operations to strike at the Unnamed's earthly operations, and finally engineering a confrontation between the Unnamed and Voormas in the hopes that whoever walks away is weak enough to take down. The only bad scenario is the aliens one, but even that's down to not having enough space to actually do it justice. Give it another ten or fifteen pages and it would have been on the same polished level as the rest. Hubbard worked on it and his stuff is generally good (and it pleases me that the scenario involving aliens has an author who shares a name with L. Ron.) EDIT: I do have one gripe with the science of the Earth Shakes scenario, which is calling the impactor an asteroid. If it's large enough to create a new moon with its impact - barring ridiculous hypervelocity or outright MAGIC! (which to be fair is also what's going on, since this is Rorg getting pissy) - it's not an asteroid. It's large enough to be a planet. Describing it as 'several miles wide' and 'thousands of tons in mass' really undercuts just how terrifyingly big this thing has to be to cause that scenario. It doesn't need to be as big as Theia, but it would nonetheless fall into the kind range we usually associate with planets rather than asteroids. Rorg's talon is scary, yo. It'd be pretty boss to run a mage game after a major hit from it, and you could easily use Lucifer's Hammer as a basis, though you might need to cut out the weird racial stuff and the quasi-fascist politics (it's 70s sci-fi written by STEM professionals. Of course it's racist and weirdly political) to make it a good game. Loomer fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Sep 17, 2016 |
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Sep 17, 2016 05:28
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