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God, I know I said I wanted the oWoD back. But not like this.Mendrian posted:Maybe it will be a cultural touchstone, drawing on actual Roma myth and talk about monsters unique to that culture? That could work. Like you could write a supplement about Norse monsters and myth in the context of the World of Darkness, or various African myths, etc, without diving into full racist territory. I think you found the only possible way to handle the matter without it being a gigantic tire fire, but there's the salvage issue. A book like that could actually be very neat, but for White Wolf it has the baggage of Gypsies to go with it. If they do do something like you suggest and pull it off as both good and culturally sensitive, I'll be amazed and probably slide right back into true believer status since it'd be such an impressive feat of handling delicate issues, renegotiating ground that their predecessors ruined, etc. EDIT: Oh good, Shattered Dreams is out. I can finally incorporate it into the Timeline (to avoid text changing massively over the course of a kickstarter, its addons, etc, I don't use the pre-release preview text.) and database. The timeline is actually the bit I'm most excited about with the Project, since it contains lots of neat and unintended consequences, coincidences, etc. E.g. 1957 had the Third Sabbat Civil War, but is also the year when the Camarilla drove the Setites out of Colombia with the Giovanni's assistance, FBI-SAD reaches its peak of activity, the American Association for Extra-Vital Researches was founded, and MAgadon (pre-Pentex at this stage) had an 'incident' in West Virginia where 400 people die of a haemorraggic fever. 1958 sees the rise of the New England Society of Hauntings, Manifestations, and Ectoplasmic Investigations - and New England is a hive of Sabbat activity. Taken together, the narrative for that year is this. The chaos of the Sabbat Civil War results in many killings with little regard for the Masquerade. FBI-SAD activity reaches a peak because of all the freaky poo poo and extremely gruesome murders, and many ghosts are spawned by the horrific violent deaths of mortals caught in the crossfire or used as fuel for the fighting, which in turn fuels the birth of the ghost-chasing AAEVR and NESHMEI. Meanwhile, thanks to the sudden slackening of the pressure put on the Camarilla by the Sabbat, their south american operations manage a minor victory against the Setites because they no longer need to worry as much about supply lines or ambush by Sabbat forces but manage no major campaigns because there simply isn't time to organize one before the war ends again. And in West Virginia, the Reston event expy is tied into the Sabbat Civil War in a different way. We know that certain Tzimisce elders have become a haemorrhagic fever with advanced vicissitude - the Magadon Incident can be linked in as one of those elders escaping its containment for fear of Sabbat packs coming after its blood. None of these events are meant to be linked to the civil war except perhaps Colombia, but they can be spun into part of a larger narrative only glimpsed by each individual line. Another neat coincidence? 1890 has both the Storm Eater being rebound and the Technocracy emerging in its modern form out of the Grand Housekeeping (depending, that is, on which book you listen to regarding date. The Syndicate certainly think so.) which is neat as Storm-Eater was both a Wyrm and Weaver spirit of immense power. His binding was an act of great static magic when you use a Mage view, so at the same time as the Garou, champions of the wyld (in theory) are conducting a great Static working that gives the Weaver even greater power, the modern Technocratic Union emerges. Two totally unrelated events that are the climax of events from the last decades, but they take place at the same time, and there is no such thing as coincidence in magic. Both become expressions of the same calcification. Double edit: Jesus christ there's people seriously arguing that humans have Rage - as in, Werewolf Rage, right down to using terms like 'black rage' and 'red rage' as distinct categories - over at OPP. Loomer fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Oct 1, 2016 |
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Oct 1, 2016 05:09
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Loomer posted:God, I know I said I wanted the oWoD back. But not like this. And the monkey's paw slowly curled all but its middle finger. This is what you get for wanting things.
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Oct 1, 2016 07:25
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nrook posted:Um, excuse me, United States vampires protect the American people by running a powerful anti-supernatural U.S. government agency. They're heroes, if you think about it. I always liked the (possibly) subtle insinuation in the VTR clan books that the vampires involved in Task Force: VALKYRIE might actually be taking an active roll in hunting down their own kind. Of course they're vampires so they gently caress their little war up by being a bunch of crazy corrupt assholes who half-rear end the job and generally just make everything worse. As a side note, the VTR clan books are utterly batshit insane in how much narrative content they're concealing. I wish there were more VTR books like them. I remember there being this thread on RPG.net's forums that had the authors of the VTR clan books posting in them explaining what they were going for when writing them and it turned out to be absolutely huge. The thread ended up being a synopsis of every major named character in the books and the meta-plot it presented. It turned out there was a lot of really sneaky stuff going on beyond the descriptions of how each clan lived that you don't get if you don't pay attention to the written letter segments at the start and end of each book. Or if you haven't read books in the Hunter line. Edit: Found the thread. It's a really neat read on how the books were put together, if nothing else. https://forum.rpg.net/archive/index.php/t-464972.html Keep in mind that the plot synopsis gets updated several times as the topic goes on. It's really nuts how much they managed to cram into those things. Archonex fucked around with this message at 08:06 on Oct 1, 2016 |
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Oct 1, 2016 07:34
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Obligatum VII posted:And the monkey's paw slowly curled all but its middle finger. Hope is a mistake. Archonex posted:I always liked the (possibly) subtle insinuation in the VTR clan books that the vampires involved in Task Force: VALKYRIE might actually be taking an active roll in hunting down their own kind. Of course they're vampires so they gently caress their little war up by being a bunch of crazy corrupt assholes who half-rear end the job and generally just make everything worse. Yeah, the VtR clanbooks are basically what Masquerade tried to do with it's supplements but way better done.
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Oct 1, 2016 15:01
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Kavak posted:Well that sucks. I'm really not interested in a WoD game set in this new canon. I'd still be up for an Obsidian WoD game as long as they had free reign. They made Kotor 2 which spends most of its time making GBS threads on the basic premises of Star Wars, so something similar with the new edition of oWoD could be good. All that stuff from Swedish Dracula is pretty  though. I can see ways where a lot of this stuff could be done well. The lure of fascism, for instance, is a genuinely interesting topic but judging from what he has said and written so far, it doesn't seem like he has the skill to thread those needles.
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Oct 1, 2016 15:36
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UrbicaMortis posted:All that stuff from Swedish Dracula is pretty That's the part that's frustrating to me. They keep saying stuff that sounds interesting and fun, and then immediately adding something else that screws it up. I guess from the videos it sounds like they're still very much in the conceptual stage, and it does seem like they're at least looking at fan reactions to what they say and trying to course correct when something comes across as negative (though their attempts at corrections seem to often lead to another blunder). I can't help but feel like all of this is going to end up continually stepping on mines that OPP (for the most part) would know how to easily avoid at this stage. Maybe if a lot of the people doing the actual writing end up being the OPP crew, it'll even things out.
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Oct 1, 2016 15:56
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Elswyyr posted:If you mean Zwarte Piet, no. If you mean racism? yeah Nope it is a tradition in a lot of Northern Europe. There is a massive issue with blackface being seen as acceptable at German Carnivals and on TV.
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Oct 1, 2016 17:46
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I'd like the clan books even more than I do if they wouldn't use those horrible cursive fonts. I have the worst time reading them and it's such slow going that I just give up and move on.
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Oct 1, 2016 17:56
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Pope Guilty posted:I'd like the clan books even more than I do if they wouldn't use those horrible cursive fonts. I have the worst time reading them and it's such slow going that I just give up and move on. But how else will you know the people writing these notes are from ye olde times?  I'm convinced that it was a deliberate choice to do that since a fair number of them have some of the aforementioned hidden content hidden in them. Nothing like irritating the hell out of the reader to make them skip over sections of the book! Regardless, they need to quit dicking around with writing the same two or three VTR books for years on end and make more clan book style books. I want more Count loving Dracula and Felix shenanigans. Also, some more stuff with the Mekhet clan book character Frances or the Chicago cast from the novels would be cool. Frances is a character that never gets old. Someone else earlier in the thread also mentioned that the Greg Stolze novels about the Chicago setting were awesome and I can indeed confirm that they're pretty great. Archonex fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Oct 1, 2016 |
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Oct 1, 2016 18:09
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I'm not gonna lie. I copy and paste the text from the PDFs I buy to try and get around reading the god awful font choices. I even run my own OCR sometimes on stuff I have that never got OCR'd before going up for sale.
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Oct 1, 2016 18:16
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I just finished listening to the whole Q&A Section, and it's pretty amazing hearing them talk about how their transgressive focus won't be a problem for women and minorities when a woman got shouted down by another audience member mid-question with "RESOURCES DOTS WORK THE SAME NO MATTER WHAT GENDER YOU ARE!" and then they didn't let her finish once they got the audience to calm down.
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Oct 1, 2016 18:23
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Archonex posted:Frances is a character that never gets old. I mean. She's a vampire.
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Oct 1, 2016 18:28
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UrbicaMortis posted:I'd still be up for an Obsidian WoD game as long as they had free reign. They made Kotor 2 which spends most of its time making GBS threads on the basic premises of Star Wars, so something similar with the new edition of oWoD could be good. Hopefully they'll either try to set things before this new canon to avoid a lot of these issues or may even just ignore it. They're the ones who're going to be making any amount of money for Paradox off this.
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Oct 1, 2016 19:27
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Archonex posted:I always liked the (possibly) subtle insinuation in the VTR clan books that the vampires involved in Task Force: VALKYRIE might actually be taking an active roll in hunting down their own kind. Of course they're vampires so they gently caress their little war up by being a bunch of crazy corrupt assholes who half-rear end the job and generally just make everything worse. drat, that's really cool. I love that kind of narrative mystery that you have to piece together. Now I kind of wish I'd bothered to read the Clanbook fiction instead of just skipping through to the bloodlines and devotions...
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Oct 1, 2016 20:17
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Scion update: 192k. Ready-Made Characters PDF confirmed.
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Oct 1, 2016 21:42
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The nWoD clanbooks were great and completely blew up the common allegation that the nWoD's commitment to usability meant that it couldn't play host to a compelling 'official' story.
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Oct 2, 2016 00:39
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dr_ether posted:Nope it is a tradition in a lot of Northern Europe. There is a massive issue with blackface being seen as acceptable at German Carnivals and on TV. That's still not Sweden? And why are abstract average levels of social racism even being discussed? From his statements on all other issues it's pretty clear the man's a complete clodding idiot from the deep recesses of ignorant nerddom.
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Oct 2, 2016 02:26
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Nicolae Carpathia posted:drat, that's really cool. I love that kind of narrative mystery that you have to piece together. Now I kind of wish I'd bothered to read the Clanbook fiction instead of just skipping through to the bloodlines and devotions... Other stuff I vaguely remember off hand: A lot of the clan books had content cut or rewritten. Like, huge stuff. The thread touches on it when an author mentions that they changed the storyline focus halfway through. Which probably lead to them having a more toolkit approach. There used to be a website out there with some of it, but I think it's since been taken down. Ventrue basically had an entirely different "hidden" storyline intended that never went through due to the later authors taking it in a much more interesting direction of being one big game of lies and skullduggery. Daeva was originally going to be the book that had a character viewing things from the ground floor of the setting similar to the Nosferatu and Gangrel book. Ayesha was going to be a newly embraced vampire before they adopted her as the sire from the "Never Give Up the Night" playthrough on the forums. Unfortunately they went for the generic choice and made the Gangrel be the bloody/gritty/horrifying ground floor look at a character's life in the setting and Daeva be the generic highbrow look at the setting like just about every other bit of OWoD/NWoD fiction. Talk about a missed opportunity to put a new spin on the setting. Archonex fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Oct 2, 2016 |
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Oct 2, 2016 04:46
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That kind of cut content is what I'd kill to have access to for the Project.
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Oct 2, 2016 05:00
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Archonex posted:But how else will you know the people writing these notes are from ye olde times? That was me, and yeah I loving love those two Chicago novels and the crew that shows up in the fiction. Prince Maxwell, Bruise, Scratch, Solomon Birch, Persephone Moore, etc.
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Oct 2, 2016 05:19
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anti_strunt posted:That's still not Sweden? And why are abstract average levels of social racism even being discussed? From his statements on all other issues it's pretty clear the man's a complete clodding idiot from the deep recesses of ignorant nerddom. It's amazing that all those fringe right groups being elected are done by the nerds, likewise racist police officers blowing people away. Likewise nerds in charge of the NFL conspiring to oust people who refuse to stand for the national anathem. Racism/Sexism/Whatever is insanely mainstream and one of the reason genre fiction has always had a large left wing contingent, because people who don't fit into mainstream politics flee into niche groups to socialize. It's why punk contains both neonazis and commies.
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Oct 2, 2016 06:18
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A post at the White Wolf reddit got me thinking about non-Corax avian shifters, and brought me to a neat idea. Magpie shifters. Each Breed has a specific role to play in Gaia's plan, but there's a missing place - none of them are actually the appointed custodians of the law. Nagah are judges and executioners, but not jurists, which is actually a problem in that when you're an executioner, every problem begins to look like it could use a good swing of the beheading axe. The Corax have no real traditional presence in Australia either, so that means their usual role is unoccupied. So for Australia, magpie shifters taking on the role of the Corax as couriers of knowledge, while also having the responsibility of knowing and spreading the Law to the other breeds of Australia, like the local Nagah, Bunyip, and Mokole. It'd even play into the concept that Australia is where the wars of Rage never really hit, and where the Bunyip were quite well integrated with the fera of the continent in a way that never quite happened in the rest of the world (apart from Asia) - Magpie's home is there, and he was busy chortling his way between the various groups to ensure that peace remained, while also making sure to impart Law on the human population to keep them from overstepping, mitigating the need for the violent cleansing seen in the rest of the world while enabling the birth and creation of an incredible, near-nationwide system of nomadic agriculture that lead to extraordinary fertility and fostered animal life. This is more or less what Magpie does in quite a lot of Dreaming stories. He pops around, and while he often stays in one place, he acts as a mediator, as a learned figure who has specific responsibilities in terms of the Law, and as a warrior when necessary. Often he's been chastised at one point or another himself, resulting in his mixed colouration, which is part of why you get the association of him with the Law - he's both a cautionary example at times and a figure who, having transgressed, knows precisely how important it is not to. It also pairs nicely with how bad the Nagah have been at their job in the rest of the world - somewhere along the line, they lost track of their magpie cousins and so lost the actual keepers of the law. They're well-meaning enforcers struggling to remember how the Law should be, and the result is a flawed, only half-right approach to their sacred duty. Just a thought on how to use actual Australian animals for fera, integrating them both into the continental and the broader global narrative of the Fera, while paying respect to the roles Magpie has in many indigenous cultures here. One of my great annoyances is that for all Werewolf and even Mage talks about the Dreaming as a vast and inspiring thing, it never actually does anything with it other than say 'and then white people ruined it.' In doing so, we get a near total lack of any native animals being represented in the Fera beyond the Thylacine Bunyip (Garou, for some reason, rather than a different breed entirely like the Ajaba) and a few Goanna or Saltie mokole. The actual iconic Aussie animals for some reason get shafted off to the side. We get a spiel about how Australia is a magic place with magic people (which is often a little, uh, awkward to say the least in how it comes very close to a fetishized other) and then we do nothing with that magic, and when something with it does get done, it usually approaches the concept of the Dreaming very wrong.
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Oct 2, 2016 07:14
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I had played with this idea when I thought of a way to use the Strix in an oWoD game: Gaia's original lorekeepers and lawgivers were a race of owl-shifters. When the War of Rage began, the last of them turned to the vampires of Enoch for protection, only to be betrayed. But their angry spirits remained, hell-bent on taking revenge on vampire and werewolf alike...
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Oct 2, 2016 07:52
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Well, the Nagah were supposed to be the judges, juries, and executioners of Gaia. And the Mokolé were meant to be her mediators. But then the Nagah decided that their own existence was more important than justice and the war of rage happened.
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Oct 2, 2016 14:51
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What do you fine folk think about the Metis Thrall of the Wyrm? Today's 'what the hell' is coming from the OPP forums again, where I'm arguing with someone who maintains it - as currently written - is necessary and irreplaceable to 'punish munchkins'.
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Oct 2, 2016 18:02
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I think it's dumb as hell and an artifact of the MRH "TRANSGRESSION!" Era. Besides Lupus are the munchkin breed cause they get 5 gnosis.
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Oct 2, 2016 18:07
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Loomer posted:What do you fine folk think about the Metis Thrall of the Wyrm? Today's 'what the hell' is coming from the OPP forums again, where I'm arguing with someone who maintains it - as currently written - is necessary and irreplaceable to 'punish munchkins'.
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Oct 2, 2016 18:17
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Kurieg posted:I think it's dumb as hell and an artifact of the MRH "TRANSGRESSION!" Era. Besides Lupus are the munchkin breed cause they get 5 gnosis.
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Oct 2, 2016 18:39
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Yawgmoth posted:lol @ having rules to "punish munchkins" like that's a thing rules can ever do Seems like trying to drown a fish, doesn't it?
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Oct 2, 2016 19:36
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Yawgmoth posted:lol @ having rules to "punish munchkins" like that's a thing rules can ever do Paranoia manages it, sorta, but that's because Paranoia is a game equally hostile to all who play it.
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Oct 2, 2016 19:44
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Daeren posted:Paranoia manages it, sorta, but that's because Paranoia is a game equally hostile to all who play it. Friend computer thinks thats Communist propoganda and those that perpetuate said thoughts are communist mutant spies that need to be exterminated.
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Oct 2, 2016 19:59
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Lupus Ahroun Stargazers every day. Get a couple dozen xp of free stats over just about anyone, god forbid they're a Homid Ragabash almost-anything. You'd think that an easy fix would be going "Homid gets 1 because they're disconnected, Lupus get 3 because they're more tied to Gaia but can't comprehend it proper, Metis get 5 due to them being the closest to spirits for reasons" but then you'd have people picking Thick Hide for the added soak bonus and not caring about anything else.
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Oct 3, 2016 00:06
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Yeah, Metis always struck me as being the ones who should have the highest gnosis since they've spent their entire life in a caern and are the unique product of two hybrid spirit-flesh entities, whereas all other Garou are born or sired from mundane flesh (insofar as one can call a human being mundane, which in the oWoD is actually a very deceptive worldview that is nonetheless broadly adopted.)
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Oct 3, 2016 05:04
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Back on the subject of Gypsies (ugh), What would be really cool would be a book or series of books that cover Roma and other lesser-known and marginalized cultures and how their traditions and folklore fit in to the World of Darkness. Not "Gypsies have magic powers" but "Roma folk magic looks like this, and a Mage from this culture might use Rotes that look like this, and they describe vampires like this and here's a bloodline that partially inspired that legend" and so on. Talk about how their culture is viewed and how they deal with prejudices, and how that affects their relationships with WoD political structures when they become aware of them. Granted how lesser-known a culture is varies by geography, but as a white American dude I know very little about the Roma, Australian natives, Inuit, and so on. There are probably dozens of really fascinating cultural groups out there that I don't even know exist. While I'm sure that there are good books about any given culture, tabletop gaming is an opportunity to get these stories in front of people who might not pick up a textbook while also drawing on a huge well of fantastic material for a modern-real-world-ish setting. There's a ton of really great stuff you can write about these groups without making them magic noble savages and it's a shame that more people don't do that.
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Oct 3, 2016 17:51
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Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:Back on the subject of Gypsies (ugh), What would be really cool would be a book or series of books that cover Roma and other lesser-known and marginalized cultures and how their traditions and folklore fit in to the World of Darkness. Not "Gypsies have magic powers" but "Roma folk magic looks like this, and a Mage from this culture might use Rotes that look like this, and they describe vampires like this and here's a bloodline that partially inspired that legend" and so on. Talk about how their culture is viewed and how they deal with prejudices, and how that affects their relationships with WoD political structures when they become aware of them. At this point in time, I'd expect OPP to do a better job with doing that than Swedracula. Personally, I like to include things like that in my own games, so until they make a good book about it, I'll just keep doing it myself. But that's because I have a background in learning about under-, mis-, and poorly- represented cultures and ideas. As long as people are giving it a good effort to understand that "this is the culture" and "this is the magic fiction", I think it can actually help people understand each other better. The First Nations in North America have so many different myths and cultural differences, that even as a someone who has never been "Othered", you should never be able to run out of influence. You don't need to focus on specific cultural groups based on heritage either. You can always explore socially created groups based on shared experiences too. Both sociology and cultural anthropology are good for exploring these things, and the newness of the culture combined with a good story can provide a lot of good memories while gaming. Those texts can often be boring, but there are quite a few anthologies out there that make for good reading.
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Oct 3, 2016 18:22
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The problem with old werewolf, and something that I would be more than happy to see addressed, is that most of the tribes are stereotypes and the stereotypes reflect badly upon the real world culture. The Wendigo, Uktenna, and Croatan lumped together all the native American cultures into 3 really odd divisions and with the death of the Croatan you were only left with "Mysterious Native Americans that know better than you" and "Angry Native Americans". Which only got worse in late revised when the Uktenna started bringing in people of other races as long as they weren't too white. The Fianna are the worst part of every Irish stereotype with bonus miscegenation. The Silent Striders are the "Egyptian Gypsies" Which makes almost no sense and doesn't really reflect either culture. The Black Furies are the worst parody of Feminism and are literal amazons. The Shadow Lords are ruthless backstabbing eastern european bastards and yeah sure whatever. Stargazers are tibetan monk werewolves because they needed an asian stereotype and they've even got their own werewolf kung fu. The Children of Gaia and Red Talons are just terrible, even though they don't represent any ethnic group. The Glass Walkers stopped being the Italian Mafia in 2nd edition and they're better for it. The Silver Fangs wear the trappings of Russian Royalty but are so deeply flawed that their presentation allows for a more multifaceted approach. And the Get of Fenris are based more off of the norse mythos than actual German culture, and revised has them take some long hard looks at where their past decisions and prejudices led them. Also the Bone Gnawers were built as a cultural group rather than an ethnic group and is mostly about subverting stereotypes except for their "We're literally cursed to be poor and destitute" thing. A modern werewolf re-release would need to address basically everything in my first paragraph to even pass muster anymore. OPP could maybe pull it off, but Paradox is too busy rolling in the poo poo to feel shame when you shove their noses in it.
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Oct 3, 2016 19:34
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Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:There's a ton of really great stuff you can write about these groups without making them magic noble savages and it's a shame that more people don't do that. Literally everything in the oWoD is either magic noble savages or the white people that oppress them.
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Oct 3, 2016 19:50
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Mulva posted:Literally everything in the oWoD is either magic noble savages or the white people that oppress them. That's just not true. There are also magic Asians who are fundamentally different than everyone else on earth on a spiritual level.
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Oct 3, 2016 21:18
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There's also the new tribal techno we are the world, ignore our past elements.
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Oct 3, 2016 22:51
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Kindred of the East would be about a thousand times better if it wasn't called Kindred of the East, didn't have to pretend to have any ties to Vampire, and just said they are effectively jumped up Risen that got a different result because they are from a different cultural tradition that tried different things, and there's nothing stopping Western ghosts from doing the same drat thing but the fact they haven't even considered it.
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Oct 4, 2016 00:05
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