|
So, I've been listening to Criminal, which is like these short podcasts on true, weird crime. I started from the top, and it has some extremely WoD moments. They do an interview with a coroner and her mother, also a coroner, which starts with the story of the discovery of a dead, mummified body in a heatless cabin, with signs of repeated but survived hypothermia, and in the fridge, a bottle of antifreeze and a cup. And, in the one I am listening to now: Venus flytraps grow only in a tiny handful of palces in rural North Carolina. Someone is poaching and stealing the plants. There are many, many poachers, actually. These poachers and thieves sell their plants to local farms, and also steal from the local farms. And the thing is? This is all recent. The Venus flytrap black market is totally new, because for some reason demand has shot straight up recently, and no one has any idea who's buying them. They're buying in bulk, and the main theory is 'some guy in New York is running a scam based on Venus Flytrap juice to cure cancer.' This feels like it'd be an amazing plot thread.
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2016 18:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 13, 2024 03:16 |
|
|
RocknRollaAyatollah posted:You should have photoshoped in a statue for the Earthbound one. poo poo. Missed opportunities all over the place. I didn't even draw horns and a tail on any of them.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2016 18:33
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:And the thing is? This is all recent. The Venus flytrap black market is totally new, because for some reason demand has shot straight up recently, and no one has any idea who's buying them. They're buying in bulk, and the main theory is 'some guy in New York is running a scam based on Venus Flytrap juice to cure cancer.' i dunno about that, they caught this dude: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/07/28/a-poacher-who-stole-970-venus-flytraps-in-n-c-is-sentenced-to-prison/
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2016 18:35
|
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:i dunno about that, they caught this dude: Oh, they catch poachers all the time. The episode discusses that - they make enough on the smuggling and the penalties are light enough that the poachers see no point in stopping even after getting caught multiple times. They often call the cops on each other over turf issues. The question isn't who's stealing the traps - it's why the black market in them is so active. Those don't exist unless someone is very actively buying them up. e: ah, they actually did make it a felony. They talked about trying to do that but had seemed unconfident it'd happen. It is still unclear why venus flytraps are so worthy of theft.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2016 18:45
|
|
|
You don't get the same charge from the yantra if you just grow the symbol of predatory nature yourself, you have to steal it. The local Lorehouse has a whole Excel sheet about it, they quantified that poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2016 20:24
|
|
|
Here's a fun one. Episode 15: Man gets sick of trash outside his home in Oakland, buys a Buddha statue and affixes it to the concrete by the street, on the basis that no one hates Buddha, Buddha is neutral and it will keep people from throwing trash on his lawn. He wakes up one day to find someone has carefully painted the Buddha. Jump cut, one year later, he now has a Buddhist shrine outside his house. Buddha receives sacrifices, has a house, is painted properly, and sometimes people hold feasts at the Buddha. Every feast day, the dude is given food and liquor by the locals to recognize him as the bringer of the Buddha. He continually explains to them that it's only two people in the house and they can't actually eat all that. He has no loving idea why, and can't convince them he doesn't need gifts. Also, the local drug dealers and prostitutes have now vanished at the end of a slow shift since he bought the Buddha.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2016 21:02
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Here's a fun one. Episode 15: Man gets sick of trash outside his home in Oakland, buys a Buddha statue and affixes it to the concrete by the street, on the basis that no one hates Buddha, Buddha is neutral and it will keep people from throwing trash on his lawn. poo poo, I wish I'd known about this trick in college.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2016 21:13
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Here's a fun one. Episode 15: Man gets sick of trash outside his home in Oakland, buys a Buddha statue and affixes it to the concrete by the street, on the basis that no one hates Buddha, Buddha is neutral and it will keep people from throwing trash on his lawn. Well its not the Buddha as the Buddha is to busy chilling in nothingness to really do anything.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2016 21:57
|
|
|
Senior Scarybagels posted:Well its not the Buddha as the Buddha is to busy chilling in nothingness to really do anything. iconoclast located
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 00:19
|
|
|
Kellsterik posted:iconoclast located If you meet the Buddha on the road, Kill the Buddha.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 00:27
|
|
|
MonsieurChoc posted:If you meet the Buddha on the road, Kill the Buddha. The road being enlightenment and the buddha represents the thought of stop meditating because you did it, you attained enlightenment if I remember correctly.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 00:32
|
|
|
The road is your path to enlightenment, the Buddha is the idea of authority of dogma. Your path is your path, you aren't walking the Buddha's path or your parent's path or anyone else's. If you encounter their ideas and ideals on the path you need to put them aside because ultimately only *you* can walk your path to enlightenment. And the path itself is all you need. So meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha. Or meet yourself, and your own preconceived notions of what your path is, kill yourself.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 01:47
|
|
|
Mulva posted:The road is your path to enlightenment, the Buddha is the idea of authority of dogma. Your path is your path, you aren't walking the Buddha's path or your parent's path or anyone else's. If you encounter their ideas and ideals on the path you need to put them aside because ultimately only *you* can walk your path to enlightenment. And the path itself is all you need. oh right right I forgot what the buddha was meant to represent so I completely failed in that regard
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 02:11
|
|
|
In the early 90s, there was a minimum security white collar prison in Louisiana that was housed inside the USA's last leper colony. The prison experiment was ended when it became clear to the Prison Department that the leprosy patients were not actually going to die and let them rebuild the hospital entirely, and in fact the patients and Health Department got the place declared a Historic Site. In 2015 they were forced to move to a nursing home. That's in our reality. In the World of Darkness - imagine it. There's a prison that is also home to about a hundred leprosy patients - who aren't prisoners, can leave if they want, but have often been there for sixty to eighty years and have no desire to go anywhere.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 15:43
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:In the early 90s, there was a minimum security white collar prison in Louisiana that was housed inside the USA's last leper colony. The prison experiment was ended when it became clear to the Prison Department that the leprosy patients were not actually going to die and let them rebuild the hospital entirely, and in fact the patients and Health Department got the place declared a Historic Site. Please be delicate with this one. This is a real world issue that is very sensitive. The National Hansen's Disease Center is not far from where I live, and there are still issues that need to be dealt with and real people that need help. There is still a tremendous stigma surrounding Hansen's disease patients.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 16:11
|
|
|
I agree it's something to be careful of, yeah, and you'll want to look into it and how you treat the people who have the disease. I personally find the fact that this was a real thing so cool, though, and as long as it's done respectfully I think it could be a great setting for a plot. (The trick is to remember that Hansen's, as we now call leprosy, is not something to be ashamed of. It's not deadly, it's not even really contagious any more if treated properly, but it is disfiguring and people are often unduly fearful and superstitious of it.)
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 16:36
|
|
|
Mulva posted:The road is your path to enlightenment, the Buddha is the idea of authority of dogma. Your path is your path, you aren't walking the Buddha's path or your parent's path or anyone else's. If you encounter their ideas and ideals on the path you need to put them aside because ultimately only *you* can walk your path to enlightenment. And the path itself is all you need. The thing with the koan is that the desire to become enlightened is in itself a dualistic notion because it situates enlightenment outside of the phenomenal realm. The Buddha is ultimately part of something called the dharmakaya, which is sort of the pre-dualistic ground state of existence. Nonetheless you use describable manifestations of the Buddha, such as historical manifestations, teachings, objects and images in practice. The practice is not the nature of the thing but is a tool. As a matter of fact, it may be recommended that you treat the image of the Buddha as the literal presence of the Buddha. Plus, pure devotional practices are useful too. (I took refuge with my sect about 20 years ago, though I'm lapsed now.)
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 17:10
|
|
|
MalcolmSheppard posted:The thing with the koan is that the desire to become enlightened is in itself a dualistic notion because it situates enlightenment outside of the phenomenal realm. The Buddha is ultimately part of something called the dharmakaya, which is sort of the pre-dualistic ground state of existence. Nonetheless you use describable manifestations of the Buddha, such as historical manifestations, teachings, objects and images in practice. The practice is not the nature of the thing but is a tool. As a matter of fact, it may be recommended that you treat the image of the Buddha as the literal presence of the Buddha. Plus, pure devotional practices are useful too. I took refuge in the Fo Guang Shan sect but with no one else near me, I have been using theravada, Tibetan and zen groups to help. I just am not smart enough to remember everything. I think though, bringing this back around to wod, the concepts and views of the various buddhist sects could make for a good theme for promethean and maybe changeling, though I am not sure on that.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 17:32
|
|
|
Running a couple more numbers. With Hunter, the most representative population to use is America, simply because it is the largest and, crucially, most exposed. A major failure point of hunter-net in-universe was that it was biased towards the anglosphere and towards America in particular, so it's actually not unreasonable to assume similar ratios of Hunter:Mortal apply to other nations. Given that, we have some 224 verifiable unique hunters in North America. If we assume there are literally no more, and that every single Imbued in North America is both known and identified in the books, we get a ratio of 1 Imbued (including Bystanders) for every 1.3 million people in the CONUS as of 2004. If we extrapolate that to a global population using today's world pop figure, we should see something like 5400 Imbued and Bystanders worldwide. Complicating this is that a full 15% of known Imbued are actually listed as Deceased, so we may need to discount them from the figures, but let's not. This way, the Imbued is almost literally one in a million, which is already a very low figure even by the tone of the game. From those figures and the relatively rare number of known Creeds, we should see (each number applies to each creed seperately but are lumped for convenience) 594 Avengers, Judges, and Redeemers; 486 Innocents and Martyrs; 432 Waywards and Visionaries; 702 Bystanders, 702 Defenders; and finally, 386 Hermits. Off the bat, that means our actual number of Imbued capable of actually fighting (Hermits can't, even if they are excellent infrastructure and CnC assets) drops to around 4300 Imbued. It's a grim fight if we go just by those numbers, so it's a good thing they're more or less a bare minimum estimate.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 17:40
|
|
|
If those are the numbers, then any given party of Hunters means large parts of the world have no one.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 17:47
|
|
|
Yeah. I honestly think you can up them five times over without it wrecking the feel of the line - at that rate you're still looking at large areas with no one or, at most, one solitary, isolated protector. Personally, I'd probably drop it as low as 1:25000, but have everyone be unconnected in a Hunter game. One in a million as antagonists for Vampire might actually work though.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 17:53
|
|
|
Senior Scarybagels posted:I took refuge in the Fo Guang Shan sect but with no one else near me, I have been using theravada, Tibetan and zen groups to help. I just am not smart enough to remember everything. I think though, bringing this back around to wod, the concepts and views of the various buddhist sects could make for a good theme for promethean and maybe changeling, though I am not sure on that. I have thought of it for Changeling, definitely since your character explicitly has no essence and must find liberation without it. Promethean is more explicitly transcendental, but it's similar.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 18:06
|
|
|
Loomer posted:Personally, I'd probably drop it as low as 1:25000, but have everyone be unconnected in a Hunter game. One in a million as antagonists for Vampire might actually work though. How many Vampires did you end up identifying? I thought the canonical Camarilla ratio was 1 Vampire:100,000 Humans, so 1 Hunter for every 10 Vampires seems like a lot.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 18:17
|
|
|
ulmont posted:How many Vampires did you end up identifying? I thought the canonical Camarilla ratio was 1 Vampire:100,000 Humans, so 1 Hunter for every 10 Vampires seems like a lot. The vampire file is still undergoing cleaning and consolidation, but contains something on the order of 14000-20,000 entries, depending on how many are duplicates and how many are multiples, but likely higher in real terms when location is factored in than the official ratio. the fluff tends to support there being less Imbued than vampires overall, with major imbued gatherings like the El Paso raid being stark and near-unheard of concentrations of force. At the moment, Demon, Hunter and some general content are the only datasets properly pruned of duplicates etc, even if I need to add the odd entry from novels I'm chewing through or new releases. The cleaning process is slow, as I have to cope with years of irregular formatting of entries that make scripting it tricky and beyond my limited know how to automate, and then remove duplicates while reconciling any inconsistencies in entries and recording the primary source used and where else they appeared. It is, at least, much faster than gathering the information was in the first place. Loomer fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Nov 16, 2016 |
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 18:28
|
|
|
I kind of wonder what a population map would look like. Werewolves primarily are in rural and wild areas (but not exclusively), while vampires are primarily in urban areas (but not exclusively), say.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 18:30
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:I kind of wonder what a population map would look like. Werewolves primarily are in rural and wild areas (but not exclusively), while vampires are primarily in urban areas (but not exclusively), say. I should be able to address at least some of this by the end. I'm not exactly sure how to visually represent the information but enough should be there to give us something.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 18:34
|
|
|
ulmont posted:How many Vampires did you end up identifying? I thought the canonical Camarilla ratio was 1 Vampire:100,000 Humans, so 1 Hunter for every 10 Vampires seems like a lot. Yeah, but even if do that, there are so many other things in the night beside vampires. You don't even have to use the "official" stats from other game lines, make it so there's only one hunter per 20/ 50/100 supernaturals, all of which is more than a match for a single hunter.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 18:36
|
|
|
Loomer posted:I should be able to address at least some of this by the end. I'm not exactly sure how to visually represent the information but enough should be there to give us something. I predict you'll end up with giant blobs near NYC and Chicago, a nebulous Amazonian chunk, a completely nonsensical scatter plot across Australia owing to their general ignorance of Everything there, a big asterisk in place of a stat for much Asia (minus Japan, and Russia will be a frowny face), then surprisingly large gaps in coverage across much of Europe. Should be chill. Then if you want to get REAL fancy pull up world population charts for like...1999ish? And see how those map.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 20:32
|
|
|
There will also be random shading across the oceans. Thanks, Blood-Dimmed Tides.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 20:50
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:There will also be random shading across the oceans.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 20:52
|
|
|
Even the mermaid milk?
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 21:00
|
|
|
Well since Imbued were supposed to be the modern incarnation of the Solar Exalted there would only be 300 of them, right?
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 23:34
|
|
|
Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:Well since Imbued were supposed to be the modern incarnation of the Solar Exalted there would only be 300 of them, right? Original Hunter was so poorly conceived.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2016 23:42
|
|
|
Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:Well since Imbued were supposed to be the modern incarnation of the Solar Exalted there would only be 300 of them, right? Actually, they are modern incarnations of the Wan Xian from Kindred of the East, as revealed in some supplements. The two Angels that empower them are the Ebon Dragon and Scarlet Empress, and Hunter Glyphs are shown to be similar/descended from Kaja script. 
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2016 00:04
|
|
|
If they actually went whole hog, the Exalted showing up and showing the pampered little jackasses of the oWoD what *really* dysfunctional and insane assholes can do would've been kinda funny.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2016 00:05
|
|
|
I imagine it'd end like the Week of Nightmares did, with the Technocracy going "gently caress it" and nuking everything.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2016 04:03
|
|
|
MonsieurChoc posted:Actually, they are modern incarnations of the Wan Xian from Kindred of the East, as revealed in some supplements. The two Angels that empower them are the Ebon Dragon and Scarlet Empress, and Hunter Glyphs are shown to be similar/descended from Kaja script. Don't forget they're also Lucifers doing!
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2016 04:49
|
|
|
Wrong thread
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2016 06:13
|
|
|
I'm starting to chew my way through MET:Werewolf20, and there's already some 'oys' above and beyond the artwork. At one point, it has the Garou nation reduced to a grand total of 13 caerns. Good job, BNS - you literally broke the Garou Nation to reflect the games of a minority.METW20,p36 posted:"The Council of Tribes has ruled, through the narrowest of To start, it supposes that all Garou globally are bound by The Council of Tribes in real terms - and that Council is newly introduced in this book, but stretches back into ancient history. It takes the concept of the Garou Nation and takes it at face value like an actual organized nation, as opposed to its real meaning - a collection of related peoples loosely bound together by a common culture and working towards a similar end. Then we get the actual decision, which more or less turns its back on the prevailing theme of what happens when Garou meets Vampire by making it now a Garou-wide interpretation of the tenet. Before, you had a lot of tension rising from 'is this going to be a strained and rare alliance, or a bloodbath?', while now at least on paper all Garou are to just shrug and move on if they find a vampire. This happens again and again in its section on the Litany: this 'council' issues binding determinations, like a Garou High Court. It renders any hope I had of putting out a collection of jurisprudence on the Litanies as a LARP prop, since there's now a higher court that overrides it all. Ugh. If this is the direction of Werewolf that passed nWW muster, I do not have high hopes for Werewolf 5e. Many of the changes made are barely comprehensible to people who weren't a part of the LARP scene that had storylines related to it, which means all the minor LARP organizations now have a book that in no way reflects the game they've been playing. Others strain credulity, or are quite literally apocalyptic in their ramification in a way that isn't addressed in the text. Like METV20, it's a really bad setting update, and as a non-LARPer I can't comment on any mechanical changes. I can, as the oWoD loving lunatic I am, talk about setting clashes, and I'll write up a full effortpost about it as I go through the book. I don't care about minor inconsistencies or changes made to reflect 'wow, that was a terrible idea to put in originally, let's deal with that' or even metaplot advancement, but there are basic and fundamental changes to foundational setting elements that seem to go too far by, well, far.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2016 09:13
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 13, 2024 03:16 |
|
|
Cabbit posted:I imagine it'd end like the Week of Nightmares did, with the Technocracy going "gently caress it" and nuking everything. a solar exalted just uses his perfect defense and then brain washes a lowly syndicate grunt, within the week essence two solars control north america
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2016 09:13
|
|