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MonsieurChoc posted:In the Carthian book, the concept of a "Bodhisattcracy" is discussed, that is rule by those who have achieved Golconda, among the various forms of vampiric government they experiment with. There's a running theme with the Carthians that any group built around idealism and an enlightened group/guru is either 1) going to end in tears, death, madness, vengeful ghosts, and your vitae turning in to brackish water (the Burning Horizon) or 2) is set up by a manipulative rear end in a top hat that's hoodwinking younger and dumber vampires with their bullshit. The fact that the Carthians are well aware of this and go "well that failed but the next time we'll do better!" says quite a bit about them. *EDIT* Mors Rattus posted:The Teotl, on my first read, appear to be heavier on the hedonist/sexual side of things, but I don't really mind - they're very passionate gods, tied deeply to blood and life and the land. The signature power of the Teotl is Nextlahualli - the power to tap into the ritual debt of sacrifice for power. The example powers listed let you heal yourself when you gain Legend from a major sacrifice, or sense sacrifices made to you or the Teotl near you and use one of your powers to grant the request of the mortal doing the sacrifice, even if they'd be out of range of your power. Oh thank god they rescued her from the stupidity of being a love-lorn idiot from 1e. I also like what they did with Huitzilopotchli this go around. As much fun as him and his children being the divine equivalent of a wrecking ball on two feet they capture him much better this way. That and Quetzalcoatl no longer being "totally a white Jesus with a bit of a tan". Also gently caress yes Mictecacihuatl and Day of the Dead playing a role. citybeatnik fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Dec 1, 2016 |
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Dec 1, 2016 18:24
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The Carthians are really interesting that way because they are idealists...but their ideal is essentially 'anything but this loving feudalism.' Democracy? Sure, let's try it. Rule by theoretical vampire buddhas? Couldn't be worse! Blood communism? gently caress it, let's give it a shot. This is admirable until you remember that in all of these, humans remain food rather than citizens. Humans are the means of production being seized, so to speak.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:30
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Kurieg posted:Golconda usually only comes up in the same breath as the Salubri, the special snowflake clan that are too good for this sinful earth. I'm pretty sure Golconda is just code for getting Daiomonion up to rank ten. Saulot being a huge rear end in a top hat who spreads lies about absolutely everything is canon as hell.
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Dec 2, 2016 07:36
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Mors Rattus posted:The Carthians are really interesting that way because they are idealists...but their ideal is essentially 'anything but this loving feudalism.' Democracy? Sure, let's try it. Rule by theoretical vampire buddhas? Couldn't be worse! Blood communism? gently caress it, let's give it a shot. I like the idea of a vampire who was a communist in life being completely horrified to see vampires using his mortal politics as a method of exploiting humanity.
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Dec 2, 2016 13:03
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Now just picturing vampire Joe Hill appearing randomly to union leaders across the country to get them to perform a general strike against vampire-owned businesses.
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Dec 2, 2016 13:48
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unseenlibrarian posted:Now just picturing vampire Joe Hill appearing randomly to union leaders across the country to get them to perform a general strike against vampire-owned businesses. Takes more than guns to kill a dead man.
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Dec 2, 2016 13:54
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Asatru and other Norse Reconstructionist movements are clearly just the work of the Rotgrafen, who also happen to be big Carthian members. Which means that somewhere, a Rotgrafen Carthian really is trying to institute an Icelandic-esque Blood Commonwealth!
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Dec 2, 2016 15:17
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citybeatnik posted:Oh thank god they rescued her from the stupidity of being a love-lorn idiot from 1e. I really love that they take Mictecacihuatl and make her the big death god - her husband isn't even on the list because she's taken over the job so completely from him as Santa Muerte.
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Dec 2, 2016 15:19
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unseenlibrarian posted:Now just picturing vampire Joe Hill appearing randomly to union leaders across the country to get them to perform a general strike against vampire-owned businesses. Well poo poo, now I'm not sure if I want to play this or my idea for Blackadder With Fangs, complete with a ghoul that has an unnatural fondness for turnips. *EDIT* Mors Rattus posted:I really love that they take Mictecacihuatl and make her the big death god - her husband isn't even on the list because she's taken over the job so completely from him as Santa Muerte. They -really- dropped the ball with basically all the Teotl in Scion 1e and it's wonderful that they're fixing that. The idea of Huitzilopotchli's children going out to fight flower wars with their opponents for sacrifices is awesome. citybeatnik fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Dec 2, 2016 |
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Dec 2, 2016 16:57
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When I ran a game in NYC, one of the five Borough Princes of New York (specifically, Brooklyn) was an old-school labor organizer and a legit Communist. (He was a Carthian and had quite a bit of contempt for modern humanity, whom he believed were willing, loving slaves of the corporations.) It never got a chance to come up in game, but he also collected old comics, and was at one point going to try to hire the party (all Demons) to steal an original Action Comics from one of his rivals.
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Dec 2, 2016 16:59
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Here's another great example of when Changeling drops a great ball. The Scottish fae were largely behind the mustering of Jacobites for Bonnie Prince Charlie and the growth of the Scottish Independence movement in the 1730s. That's not necessarily a bad idea, but the ball they drop is this. The fae were doing it as true believers in the cause, because by god the English are annoying. It still works, it's still interesting, but the alternative... The alternative is fantastic. In it, the fae prop up and inflame the Jacobites specifically to see them lose, not because they give two shits about mortal politics but because they are creatures who feed on human emotion, passion, and stories. And say, didn't the rise and fall of the Bonnie Prince create powerful cultural icons that serve as the centre for novels, songs, poems, and films to the present day? Didn't that whole shenanigan birth great waves of emotion and works of creative brilliance? It becomes a more interesting and less clear-cut 'yay braveheart!!!!' sort of thing when the changelings begin to manipulate human affairs to create the most dramatic and inspiring outcomes, whether good or ill for the humans involved. It also brings them into natural conflict with vampires and mages in a way that the line usually struggles with. If you go with that line of reasoning, all sorts of events open up. Jimi Hendrix's career - was it all a mortal man, or did he receive a fae boon from 'friends' that saw him drown in his own vomit for the sake of the glamour his tragic tale would weave? Who really shot JFK and then spawned the conspiracy theories (each of which is, in its own right, a strange sort of elaborate art)? Much as I like not weaving every historical event into supernatural narratives, the idea of some rear end in a top hat Pooka handing out the first rough 'seed' pamphlets about how JFK is actually alive in Mexico in order to harvest glamour from paranoiac dreamers is too good to resist.
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Dec 3, 2016 04:59
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Loomer posted:Here's another great example of when Changeling drops a great ball. The Scottish fae were largely behind the mustering of Jacobites for Bonnie Prince Charlie and the growth of the Scottish Independence movement in the 1730s. That's not necessarily a bad idea, but the ball they drop is this. The fae were doing it as true believers in the cause, because by god the English are annoying. It still works, it's still interesting, but the alternative... The alternative is fantastic. In it, the fae prop up and inflame the Jacobites specifically to see them lose, not because they give two shits about mortal politics but because they are creatures who feed on human emotion, passion, and stories. When I first saw this I was going to add that it's best not to bring up Isle of the Mighty but your take on things is great as always. It's a shame Dreaming will never be this good in the materials put out for it or C20.
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Dec 3, 2016 06:14
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:At most Golconda should be a way to reverse the vampiric curse and go back to being an ordinary mortal again. Becoming a parasitic monster isn't the path the enlightenment, even if at the same time "the only possible redemption for someone like you is suicide" is kind of a lovely theme. I kinda like the idea of some people achieving some sort of hosed up and evil Golconda. If only because it highlights how loving terrifying/terrible being a vampire is in this setting. There's a running theme that everything to do with vampires is corrupted and hosed up to the point where even good intentions inevitably go wrong in some way. It's how your characters deal with that that determines whether they're downright evil or not. One of the possible takes on The Unholy is basically that entire concept summed up into a character and was a neat way to describe how Golconda might not be the paradisaical state that it was supposed to be in VTM. Edit: I just remembered that the pro-humanity branch of the Ordo Dracul in 1e are written as having literally invented a way to turn themselves back to being human again by leveraging the power of occult science and being a genuinely good person. Also, their branch specific coils outright remove some of the worst banes from vampiric existence if you want to stick around as a vampire. They basically invented Golconda through sheer intellect and humanity. Which the Ordo Dracul responded to by banning the pursuit of those coils and suppressing the gently caress out of anyone that knows them since it didn't let them become the turbo-monsters they secretly fantasize about being. Which proves that aside from some nifty coils that everyone already knows about the Ordo loving sucks since the best Mara and her turbo-Hitler counter-parts could do was find a way to eat souls even harder. Archonex fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Dec 3, 2016 |
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Dec 3, 2016 06:32
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:When I first saw this I was going to add that it's best not to bring up Isle of the Mighty but your take on things is great as always. It's a shame Dreaming will never be this good in the materials put out for it or C20. Yeah, it's generally a terrible book. I'm having to recheck entries in it unfortunately, tellingly, each time it comes up in my list it takes like three weeks to finish because it's so badly written that I can't do more than a little at a time.
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Dec 3, 2016 07:32
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I like the idea of Golconda turning you human because it seems like an obviously good deal to us: Sure, you don't have superpowers and you're not immortal but you get to see the sun, not be trapped in a murderous society and have relationships with people not based on predation. But to someone who has been a vampire long enough to locate Golconda, none of that stuff may seem appealing any more because of the person they had to become to survive as a vampire. Imagine someone early into their embrace finding out about golconda and spending centuries seeking it only to realise when they find it that it no longer holds any appeal to them, so they willingly give up on a chance for redemption to remain a vampire.
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Dec 5, 2016 19:44
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UrbicaMortis posted:I like the idea of Golconda turning you human because it seems like an obviously good deal to us: Sure, you don't have superpowers and you're not immortal but you get to see the sun, not be trapped in a murderous society and have relationships with people not based on predation. But to someone who has been a vampire long enough to locate Golconda, none of that stuff may seem appealing any more because of the person they had to become to survive as a vampire. That seems like a perfect story to tell as part of your ongoing narrative, not gonna lie. Vampires are the worst existence possible except for the fact that very few people are willing to stop being a vampire if they didn't greet the sun within the first week. Vampire is a game of Existentialist Horror.
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Dec 6, 2016 01:01
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Actually, Golconda is having a stable enough existence that you never have to worry about where your next blood point is coming from, nor that you might be killed by a rival or an up-and-comer. Many don't realize this.
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Dec 6, 2016 01:10
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Golconda is when you ascend to the higher plane of playing Mage instead
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Dec 6, 2016 01:13
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Interesting fact! Display technology has advanced to the point that you can watch beautiful sunrises from all over the world from the comfort and security of your own saferoom. #Golconda #jointheInvictus
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Dec 6, 2016 01:15
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Dammit Who? posted:Interesting fact! Display technology has advanced to the point that you can watch beautiful sunrises from all over the world from the comfort and security of your own saferoom. #Golconda #jointheInvictus
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Dec 6, 2016 01:19
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Dammit Who? posted:Interesting fact! Display technology has advanced to the point that you can watch beautiful sunrises from all over the world from the comfort and security of your own saferoom. #Golconda #jointheInvictus I saw that on True Blood. It didn't seem to work out so well there. Just like surprising elders waking up from torpor. That's something you could charge admission to see, but it would be over too fast and everyone would complain about being taken advantage of. Basically every Invictus party ever then.
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Dec 6, 2016 01:54
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Well, it's been almost two years since I backed the Kickstarter, but my copy of Dark Eras has arrived. This thing is massive - it'd probably kill a medium sized dog if it fell.
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Dec 6, 2016 02:40
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Yawgmoth posted:gently caress with elders by getting 60" UHD TVs in their sanctum and putting curtains on them. Greet them with a lovely sunrise when they wake up after some hundred+ years! This is why elders keep ghouls and childer who understand computers.
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Dec 6, 2016 04:42
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We've got a group running a weekly roll20 nWoD Demon game for a good 7 months now and are well into our third story. The first being a NYC adaptation of the intro story hook from the core book, and the second being an original story where the Cell had to infiltrate an elite underworld auction to avoid their covers getting sold out from under them. I cocked that one up on nearly every level as GM and stepped into a player role for this third story, which has us investigating a Deva-affiliated cult springing up in the city's transportation bureaucracy. Anyway, I'd sent out some human kid to monitor the subways through my Allies merit, but she goes missing and I'm on the hook. So we track her down as she's tied up in infrastructure (one stop past the end of the A line) and spring her while outrunning some minor Angels. As she's convalescing in the hospital it becomes pretty clear that she's now a stigmatic and affected by some unknown Angelic power. Our group, being pragmatic types, take her on a walk into one of our boltholes and decide that we're going to drop the whole nWoD spiel on her and turn her into one of our agents (we've houseruled it such that stigmatics can naturally see through angelic facades, making them very useful). To reduce risk of cascading compromise, we lay it on her all at once and one of us shows his true demonic form. Long story short, three compromise rolls made, three straight-up failures. By our calculations, a statistical likelihood of .33%. One guy lost two cover dots immediately, another lost one. Glitch rolls yet to be determined. It's not as bad as it could have been, given that they were in a bolthole at the time, where the God Machine can't really see, but three violent ruptures in reality within the span of a minute is getting the attention of the GM no matter where they are. So both our guys (and the escaped stigmatic) have just a bit of a head start to burn rubber before the hunter angels show. That's where we're starting next week.
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Dec 6, 2016 05:36
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The vampiric IT guy has always been a pretty great character concept.
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Dec 6, 2016 06:05
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MonsieurChoc posted:The vampiric IT guy has always been a pretty great character concept. No vampire in the world has enough Self-Control to make that many Frenzy checks.
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Dec 6, 2016 13:44
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cptn_dr posted:Well, it's been almost two years since I backed the Kickstarter, but my copy of Dark Eras has arrived. It's definitely the size and heft to be a weapon in its own right. If this was a different system, it'd probably have its own stats in regards to how deadly it is.
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Dec 6, 2016 15:16
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I did the survey white wolf is sending out to onyx oath newsletter subscribers and, surprise surprise, they really wanted to know if I liked LARPing and if not what it would get to make me start liking it.
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Dec 7, 2016 01:45
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long-rear end nips Diane posted:I did the survey white wolf is sending out to onyx oath newsletter subscribers and, surprise surprise, they really wanted to know if I liked LARPing and if not what it would get to make me start liking it. You mean like excising the creepy stuff and sending it through a wood chipper? I would definitely LARP if there were standards and a required code of conduct. But I don't see that happening until there's a lawsuit, so I'll keep not LARPing. I'll just play tabletop I guess.
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Dec 7, 2016 02:59
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long-rear end nips Diane posted:I did the survey white wolf is sending out to onyx oath newsletter subscribers and, surprise surprise, they really wanted to know if I liked LARPing and if not what it would get to make me start liking it. Important questions: What is your marital status? Did you meet your partner(s) while playing a LARP?
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Dec 7, 2016 03:15
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long-rear end nips Diane posted:I did the survey white wolf is sending out to onyx oath newsletter subscribers and, surprise surprise, they really wanted to know if I liked LARPing and if not what it would get to make me start liking it. Mandatory bathing I guess.
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Dec 7, 2016 03:20
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The ability to actually hit other players with real axes like the viking fellas here do would be a big incentive.
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Dec 7, 2016 03:53
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Jhet posted:You mean like excising the creepy stuff and sending it through a wood chipper? I would definitely LARP if there were standards and a required code of conduct. But I don't see that happening until there's a lawsuit, so I'll keep not LARPing. Yeah... it didn't give you that option.
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Dec 7, 2016 04:03
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What are the options? You'd think they'd have an "other" section you could write in.
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Dec 7, 2016 04:05
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Mendrian posted:Important questions: What is your marital status? Did you meet your partner(s) while playing a LARP? "Did Mark Rein*Hagen preside over your ceremony, like in my fanfictions?" "Oh god get Swedracula away from the Surveymonkey page!"
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Dec 7, 2016 04:07
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Loomer posted:The ability to actually hit other players with real axes like the viking fellas here do would be a big incentive. WoD boffer larp would be hilarious.
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Dec 7, 2016 05:43
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Not boffers. They use actual axes, swords, and spears, seeing as they wear actual armour. The only concession to safety is blunt edges. ...why yes, the club has significant insurance premiums, why do you ask?
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Dec 7, 2016 06:43
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Pope Guilty posted:No vampire in the world has enough Self-Control to make that many Frenzy checks. "So, how's it going?" "The Malkavian primogen thinks his computer's trying to kill again, the Brujah want to organise a Lan party next week and have put me in charge of all of it and told me today, and a Toreador "Art Project" just shutdown all out servers." "...well, at least you must get respect for the work you do." "RAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRHHGGGHH!!!"*Frenzies*
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Dec 7, 2016 06:56
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long-rear end nips Diane posted:I did the survey white wolf is sending out to onyx oath newsletter subscribers and, surprise surprise, they really wanted to know if I liked LARPing and if not what it would get to make me start liking it. The removal of all LARPers?
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Dec 7, 2016 08:15
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Dave Brookshaw posted:The removal of all LARPers? That's the natural consequence of permitting the viking larpers to use their axes on the regular larpers. Whipped up a quick look at some vampiric population ratios. For St. Louis, if we wrap in the full greater area it's 1 vampire for every 96,000 mortals. The city alone drops that to 1:14,000. Add in ghouls and they respectively become 1:43,000 and 1:6,360. Toronto has 1:50,000 in the greater area with the local area dropping to 1:29,000. Sydney was at 1:82,500. San Diego was at 1:43,000. Stockholm, in an inversion of the ratios decreasing in modern sources, is terrifyingly low at 1:8,500. Loomer fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Dec 7, 2016 |
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Dec 7, 2016 08:27
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