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Joe Slowboat posted:...I'm very sorry for setting off another round of mage chat. Mage chat is fundamentally designed to happen in a way others aren't. Vampire is more about the deafening silence of any meaning, for instance, so there's not as much to debate. Practically everything is "support the status quo" for them. Even the Dragons are only as imaginative as "What if vampires, but *better*?". Carthians trading mortal government for vampire ones. Vampires aren't even a thing really, they are a series of things that seemed to have smushed themselves into relatively similar shapes due to convergent evolution or some basic principles of undeath they all work off. And even if you knew where you came from, so what? Does it change what you have to do next? Are you any less dead? Vampire stories are almost always more personal, which doesn't make them less *interesting* but does mean there are less hanging questions around it all. You are far more tied into the practicality of dealing with the horror of being a vampire day by day. Mage on the other hand has less immediate drive. You could get magic powers and just....build a safe space in your basement and just quietly practice magic. There isn't really anything required from your new condition. Vampires need to eat, you don't need to magic. Even if you decide to make a magical heist crew to rob banks [Throughout all of time], well, that's not particularly Mage. You just happen to be people with magic powers that decided FYGM. When you do start buying into the line the Pentacle or the Seers sell, you start asking big questions about big concepts. If you ever get really, really powerful you start messing with those concepts. Quite literally. Hell even a Sleepwalker with the ability to whammy themselves into the Astral Realm can start having a meaningful impact on the subconscious of all of humanity. Once you buy into the deeper truth of what you are dealing with, you start to have the esoteric become the practical really fast. When you are staring down a dice pool that tells you you can probably impact all of humanity with your next action, you have to ask "What does it really mean to make all of humanity believe in magic?". Because it's now feasible that you can make all of humanity believe in magic. If you just hiked the robe of Death over it's head and are now delivering brutal kicks to it's ribs, you have to question what value death has to us as a species, and are you robbing us of something important by unilaterally removing it. What *is* the Lie anyway? Best as people can tell there were lovely leaders and slavery and war and all sorts of terrible bullshit back in ye olden magick times before the Fall. Life may not be as good as everyone imagines, especially in the Wo...Chronicles of Darkness, but it'd be hard to argue it's the worst it's ever been and no progress has been made. So why is the Lie still so strong? In other game lines a question like that could stand to be theoretical for quite awhile. With Mage, you can marshal ridiculous power [Especially as a group] fairly quickly, and it becomes relevant for that question to have an answer. It's not enough to just say "Exarchs did it", because you can quickly reach the point where you might meaningfully expect to start disrupting their plans. So what are their plans, their goals, their means of attack? Big concept games raise more questions. Just the nature of the beast.
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Dec 28, 2016 13:26
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I'm still sticking to my interpretation that the Supernal does not actually encompass the whole of truth, but is rather just one possible configuration of it. There is material, here and there, that hint at other stable realities outside the scope of supernal truth. Consequently, one could reason that the abyss is not, in fact, un-reality, but rather it's a lot of nascent other valid realities that are unstable of have been crammed into too small a space. It doesn't react well with the fallen world because the fallen world is only configured to accept supernal concepts (think of supernal truth like a high level programming language. The Abyss is a bunch of other languages and when they try to use the wrong compiler...) Mind you, this only works if you basically ignore all the earlier 1E abyssal material, where it very much was a negaverse that wanted to eat reality. In 2E, however, that role has been taken up by the various lower depths and the Abyss has become a bit less actively malignant (though still often quite harmful).
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Dec 28, 2016 15:29
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JohnnyCanuck posted:For this next round of MageChat, let's talk about what happens to a mage when they're caught completely unawares by a werewolf. If they're an Acanthus, they don't. Otherwise, odds on they're going to get Efficiently Killed, which might just totally bounce off if they've bothered to put double digits worth of armour and durability onto themselves that morning. Most Paths have at least one way to render yourself impossible or near-impossible to surprise which might give them a turn to get some sort of werewolf-killing spell off. The scenario boils down to 2 questions: 1) Does the Mage have some sort of method of not being in that situation? 2) Does the Mage have some way not to die when they take 17 Supernatural Lethal/Aggravated damage? If the answer to those questions is 'no', then the Mage is gonna get Efficiently Killed.
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Dec 28, 2016 15:46
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I played a two year Mage game where the archvillains were Evil Future Usses. Thing was, there was a twist: There were two sets of Evil Future Usses, who were aware of each other and hated each other, and they were using their Time magic to gently caress with us to make sure the other future didn't happen. One set were the future where we completed the Time Loop, made Los Angeles fulfill it's role as Atlantis, ripped the Angel of the San Andreas Fault Line out of the earth, cast it into the Abyss and ascend to Heaven in the gap it left. In this future we then became the Exarchs, all powerful, and left the world to rot. The other future was one where we chose to do nothing as LA was destroyed in a massive earthquake, sending the entire vast and sprawling city into the ocean. I might have mentioned the song 'Aenema' by Tool to the Storyteller as my character's piece of music during character generation. Exarch Future was way more powerful but we all hated each other in that future and were working at total cross purposes. It was a bit of a revelation to find out that the Seers we had spent the whole game loving around were doing their level best to help us in any way they could and we were making it so very hard for them. Apocalypse future were way more limited but WAY more hardcore and knew exactly how to reverse psychology us into doing whatever they wanted. So late in the game all of our terrible decisions are catching up with us. We had made an art in that game of deferring our problems endlessly and pointing all of our antagonists at each other while never resolving the threats they represented. But the bill was coming due[1] so we decided to say gently caress it and switch on the soul engine we'd spent the entire chronicle building and see what happened. We had two buildings opposite each other, one running maximum positive emotional energy - a cinema playing the movie Alice in Wonderland run by the cabal's graffiti artist Acanthus - and the other running maximum negative energy - Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon performed by my emotionally unstable rock star Obrimos. The tension between the two buildings had some insanely potent effects so we called it the Soul Engine and spent the entire series idly wiring all of LA's geomancy into it to see what would happen. So when the switch gets flipped and the music starts playing we finally perceive the full truth of the situation and know we need to decide to kill the Angel or allow LA to die. All them other fuckers wanted to sacrifice the Angel and take the Exarchhood. Their logic was that they'd take the entire city of LA up to heaven with them and if it was a time loop then, so what - 'It's an iterative process. Every time we loop around we take a few more people up with us' said those lying sons of bitches. I knew those fuckers were lying because right at the end my character's future Exarch self manifested and tried to sweet talk me around. She showed me the girlfriend who had died too drat young to try and convince me that everyone was happy together with her. And then she brought out my character's mom to tell me that everything was going to be all right. I smashed her into the ground with my guitar while screaming something like, "I KNOW YOU'RE LYING, THAT'S NOT MY MOM, MY MOM WOULD NEVER SAY THAT SHE LOVED ME." At the end of the day it was two against one, the other two PCs rolled against me to seize control over the Soul Engine - and I lost by one loving success. And so I was dragged kicking and screaming, against my will, to the celestial throne of the cosmos just in time for the universe to reset. I like to think that explained a lot about the Mage setting. That's my Mage story. Never got to play another Mage game since, though not for lack of trying. Easily the best roleplaying game I've ever been a part of. When all that grand abstract Magechat cosmic bullshit crosses over with deeply flawed player characters the game just sings. [1]: When I say the bills were coming due I mean that the ST said that his plan if the game had gone on one more session was to have a Scelesti called Manhattan who we'd accidentally created kick down our door and murder one of our apprentices as the opening to the next episode. And then the werewolves, the counterterrorism police, the Adamantine Arrow, and that lady who we think was a Changeling or something were all coming after us in short following order. We were totally hosed except that we ruined everyone's plans for vengeance by abruptly ascending to godhood. We all agreed that the moral of the game was 'if you run just fast enough you can escape the consequences of your actions'. Thanqol fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Dec 28, 2016 |
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Dec 28, 2016 15:50
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I more or less follow this thread for lore chat and magechat is some of the best. Someone talk about these Abyssal Archmages, I had no idea.
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Dec 28, 2016 16:13
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IN THE BEGINNING the Tellurian was chaotic and undefined, and competing desires flowed throughout. Desire was Law. Where two impossible desires met there was Paradox. Where sympathetic desires met, you had the beginnings of the Supernal, order and Form. The shard of the Abyss inside every person is the balance that allows the limitless possibility of Paradoxical chaos to still influence those being limited in the order of Form. With it the Supernal can grow and overcome other Paradoxical existences and integrate them, and impose Form on the universe at large. The Aswadin, the Dark Ones, seek to undermine the Phenomenal World [As most Archmages call the 'Fallen' World. It has an important role in the cosmos, calling it Fallen is petty and insulting and just plain wrong], plunging it back into the freedom of Paradoxical existence without Form. And then they'll come for the Supernal, after that's done. Can't let it happen again after all. The thing is, they really believe that. So their horrific cults and and blasphemies and hypocrisies are to break Sleepers and Travelers [As Archmages call regular mages] out of the attachment to the world of Form. The Aswadin don't need that sort of thing, in a real sense as Archmages they are *already* far along that path. It's all to help others to break free too. And by dint of being Archmages, every single one of them has the capacity to complete rewrite all of reality. Guys like that making chaos cults is just not a fun time for team reality. Of course that's just the most popular group of Abyssal Archmages, there's still randos who want to do crazy poo poo like completely replace the laws of the Shadow with Abyssal unlaws to make it function better or whatever drat fool thing gets in their head. And for all that it's pretty straight forward. Chaos and unmaking. Really hard to imagine would be a Banisher Archmaster. An amusing fact: There are a bunch of Abyssal Archmages, and while nobody is really happy about that they exist and can operate under the Pax. A Banisher even *attempting* the Threshold is considered a universal threat that allows the use of the most restricted magics to destroy their Awakening. The creepy evil dudes that want to unmake reality are considered easier to deal with than whatever the hell would happen if a Banisher got topside.
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Dec 28, 2016 16:53
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I like that the the rules of the Pax are short enough to fit on a business card, and one of them is basically "if you see a Banisher trying to Ascend, you tell every goddamned one of us you can so we can un-write his entire existence from all worlds and all timelines." Also that the response to "I want to unmake reality!" is "just one of them? Okay." Archmages are 
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Dec 28, 2016 17:50
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Yawgmoth posted:I like that the the rules of the Pax are short enough to fit on a business card, and one of them is basically "if you see a Banisher trying to Ascend, you tell every goddamned one of us you can so we can un-write his entire existence from all worlds and all timelines." I like to think that part of it is probably because they're all aware of the karma that'd occur if they got up there. Most arch mages have some colossal gently caress ups under their wing as of Imperial Mysteries. It's literally a rule of the setting. Plus, all the glorifying of mages aside the idea that some rear end in a top hat mage could throw a philosophical tantrum and say "I want reality to work like this." and suddenly wipe out everything you've achieved is a pretty hosed up idea when you think about what it means for civilization and the fundamental worth of the people living in that reality. The people with power all being self-serving (and often delusional) assholes about what they're doing is a theme in the World of Darkness. No reason it stops with mages. Archonex fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Dec 28, 2016 |
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Dec 28, 2016 18:18
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I've managed to mostly clean the vampire entries up to 1998, but haven't pruned out duplicates yet. Neat pattern emerges though - in pre-Revised content, the population is massively weighted towards elders where vampire generations are known (presumably many of those without a specified or inferrable generation are higher gen), with only 22% of the known generation population so far at 10th generation or higher. 62.5% fall within 6 to 9th generation, with the 8th generation the most populous and documented. Only 18% are known to be dead with some degree of certainty, too (though some events should really raise that higher, e.g. the Inquisition), so those aren't actually bad odds. Better than one in five that, so long as you're embraced post Inquisition, you'll survive to see Gehenna. Once the revised era material is processed and the various duplicates reconciled, the numbers should shift a little but I wouldn't expect any massive upheavals other than a big uptick in the proportion of 12th and 13th generation vampires.
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Dec 28, 2016 18:21
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So I picked up Demon: the Spyening thanks to this thread, and I love it. It clicks with me like I think Mage clicks with some of you. That said, would anyone mind helping me with an idea? Cover is Infrastructure, isn't it? Specifically Concealment Infrastructure. The process of Falling doesn't create Cover, the nature of the Concealment Infrastructure shifts and demons call the resulting altered Infrastructure Cover. See, I got the Storyteller's Guide too, and it goes into a lot of detail about how demons don't know how to create Infrastructure...but they do. Every Cover after the first God-Machine constructed one is a piece of Infrastructure, even if it's only a small, specific type. Working off of that, it's not so much that demons don't have the innate ability to build Infrastructure like they use Embeds, it's that they never learned as angels how to design Infrastructure in any other ways. But I think that conceptualizing Cover as Infrastructure leads to cool ideas, like...what does the Exploit version of Infrastructure look like? How can a demon teach themselves new Infrastructure? Do some lunatics out there research occult physics and build awful engines over and over to try to produce Infrastructure regardless of the cost? Can the information on Infrastructure design be stolen from a God-Machine Command and Control Center? What could a demon who figured it out make, and how could it all go so terribly loving wrong? Anyway I'm going to run an elaborate heist game based on that.
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Dec 28, 2016 20:16
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Tiny Deer posted:So I picked up Demon: the Spyening thanks to this thread, and I love it. It clicks with me like I think Mage clicks with some of you. That said, would anyone mind helping me with an idea? If a Demon's Cover is Infrastructure, what's its Lynchpin?
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Dec 28, 2016 20:19
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Cantorsdust posted:If a Demon's Cover is Infrastructure, what's its Lynchpin? Oh MAN that's a good question! Wow, would it literally be a sense of identity? Is there a smallest possible unit of 'self'? But unmaking someone's sense of self doesn't obliterate them from reality, so that can't be it. Goddamn I love this game. Edit: is there some kind of universal registry of 'selves' that demons are hacking into? Could you remotely destroy a Cover if you accessed it? Is that how the God-Machine makes new people to fill out Its angel's covers? Tiny Deer fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Dec 28, 2016 |
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Dec 28, 2016 20:37
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Cover was Infrastructure. It isn't any more. When an angel Falls, the Infrastructure that made them and their mission up kind of wraps around them as a sort of protective shell. My take is this is why the Machine often has no idea who a new demon is or what happened to the angel involved or even the project the angel was working on. If anything is the lynchpin for a demon's Cover, it's the demon themselves. The Machine is not organized in a human enough way that it just has a database of Cover identities and all humans ever. It cannot think in terms of individuals. It has statistics - 10% of people are X. X people react Y way. It literally cannot model a single person, just demographics.
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Dec 28, 2016 20:51
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Cover might be Infrastructure but it's important to evaluate what you think Infrastructure is. The God-Machine might be (keeping in mind we can't really say anything about nature of the God-Machine) a semi-conscious collection of interconnected Infrastructures that believes in self-preservation. From this perspective, new Infrastructure as an expansion of self owing to the God-Machine but that doesn't mean Infrastructure is somehow intrinsic to the GM. Angels also manifest something like a Cover when they walk around in the world as Agent Johnson or what have you. They have been granted a Cover. It's like an organ. It belongs to them now. Because Cover is a function of an angelic creature, it stands to reason that they get to keep it when they Fall, just as they get to keep a vague sense of their identity and other spiritual components. In other words, I would say Cover might be Infrastructure, but only insofar as Angels are themselves a kind of Infrastructure.
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Dec 28, 2016 22:29
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Isn't one of the ways to get a new cover to steal one from an angel by being in their place when they manifest? I mean you have to complete that angels focus but you get to keep the cover afterwards.
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Dec 28, 2016 22:59
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Yawgmoth posted:Archmages are This seems clearly true, but they also really seem to completely trivialize normal Mage-level play, which means that I'm really inclined as a GM to quietly erase them from the cosmology. Has anyone run into this in actual play? It's possible I'm worrying over nothing, but I have at least one player really prone to focusing on high-level elements (he played a Sidereal in a local adventuring-Solars game in Exalted, for example) and Archmages have already come up in concept, and I would prefer to focus on the Seers of the Throne and the Tremere and the like, which all seem to be rendered irrelevant by the existence of Archmages. Oh, speaking of which, thought experiment: What the heck would a Tremere Archmage be like?
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Dec 29, 2016 00:28
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Joe Slowboat posted:This seems clearly true, but they also really seem to completely trivialize normal Mage-level play, which means that I'm really inclined as a GM to quietly erase them from the cosmology. Has anyone run into this in actual play? It's possible I'm worrying over nothing, but I have at least one player really prone to focusing on high-level elements (he played a Sidereal in a local adventuring-Solars game in Exalted, for example) and Archmages have already come up in concept, and I would prefer to focus on the Seers of the Throne and the Tremere and the like, which all seem to be rendered irrelevant by the existence of Archmages. Pax Arcana already solves this for you. In effect, it just says "don't swing dick unless you're willing to get it chopped off." Archmagi are by and large invested in keeping things relatively civil and stable between the hundred-odd reality warping shotgun wizard demigods that make up their numbers, and fiddling with mundane reality too much might get one of them ripshit pissed. In addition, it's a bit like nuclear war: ideally, nobody's going to be the first to whip out a massive reality-warping ritual or spell to directly attack another archmaster or their interest, because you can be drat sure everybody else is going to fire a shot at the idiot that broke decorum, and probably retroactively make it so they never even existed. Additionally, archmagi just don't care about anything ground-level mages are going to even really be aware of. It's telling that most political factions (such as they are) of archmagi no longer really give a poo poo about the Exarchs, Oracles, Seer-Pentacle conflict, or any of that stuff. They honestly don't give a poo poo who's running the show so long as they're not personally inconvenienced. So long as they can fiddle around with their nearly incomprehensible interests and obsessions, they're fine with just about anything anyone else is doing. In addition, those obsessions usually involve cosmic+ scope nonsense, and when they interact with the ground level, it's rarely even apparent an archmaster's involved. Some Seer Ministries have archmagi openly working at their absolute top end, but they're pretty much constantly focused on just making sure their patron Exarch doesn't get too threatened by/annoyed with them. Everybody else is just loving with abstract concepts, collecting Quintessence for theoretical spells, and (usually) pursuing their own personal road to ascension to the Supernal.
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Dec 29, 2016 01:04
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Joe Slowboat posted:This seems clearly true, but they also really seem to completely trivialize normal Mage-level play, which means that I'm really inclined as a GM to quietly erase them from the cosmology. Has anyone run into this in actual play? It's possible I'm worrying over nothing, but I have at least one player really prone to focusing on high-level elements (he played a Sidereal in a local adventuring-Solars game in Exalted, for example) and Archmages have already come up in concept, and I would prefer to focus on the Seers of the Throne and the Tremere and the like, which all seem to be rendered irrelevant by the existence of Archmages. quote:Oh, speaking of which, thought experiment: What the heck would a Tremere Archmage be like? 1. Your soul is repaired, hooray! You keep the immortality and never really need to eat souls again (but you can if you want). 2. You hosed your soul up so hard that ascension is impossible. Great job, you're immortal but trapped on this world. 3. Shang Tsung.
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Dec 29, 2016 01:18
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Daeren posted:Useful Information Thanks - I guess this just makes me feel like Archmagi are pretty much replicable with high-Gnosis Mad Ones though, in plot terms? For a standard Mage game, I mean. Because if they're 'just' immensely powerful elder magetypes who can no longer meaningfully care about what actually matters, they're properly divorced from the setting, but also not really distinct from Mad Ones except that they have a decent chance of reaching Ascension any day now (and are much more immune to PC action). And if they don't care about the Ascension War because they could override it, rather than them being totally out to lunch, it makes the Pentacle useless for either adventure or horror on the grand scale, since any victories are irrelevant next to a bunch of extradimensional plus-one wizards. I'm sorry to be ornery, and if people are annoyed at this thread I can keep my frustration with archmagi out of here, I just don't really see a way to use them conceptually to improve core Mage gameplay. Actually, it really reminds me of the issues with late Exalted 2E setting writing: When there's a hundred or so unstoppable M.A.D. wizards whose politics could kill everyone or otherwise render the setting irrelevant (or in Exalted, an impending invasion by the forces of Hell and their developer-favorite spawn), it's going to be harder to get my players to focus on dealing with the things they can actually influence. Also, if Vampires can shut down Supernal magic with blood sorcery, can Mages use Awakened Magic to shut down blood sorcery? I feel like there are obvious arcanum/practice combinations to do that, but shied away from the possibility. EDIT: Also thanks to Yawgmoth!
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Dec 29, 2016 01:24
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The way I ran it was that since Prime was the arcanum of truths and symbols themselves, Prime magic could be used to manipulate, suppress, or empower any kind of ritualistic, symbolic magic - blood sorcery (but not disciplines), werewolf rites (but not gifts), etc. I'm not sure how canonical this is to 2E but it makes sense to me offhand. If you're paranoid about balance you could make that screwing with a supernatural's magic is always at least as hard as screwing with their mind and body. So like, a vampire whose magic you're trying to dispel first of all gets to Withstand your spell with their resolve or whatever appropriate trait, and then, if you manage it, you do the usual clash of wills rolloff to see whose power stands. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Dec 29, 2016 |
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Dec 29, 2016 01:29
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Joe Slowboat posted:Thanks - I guess this just makes me feel like Archmagi are pretty much replicable with high-Gnosis Mad Ones though, in plot terms? For a standard Mage game, I mean. Because if they're 'just' immensely powerful elder magetypes who can no longer meaningfully care about what actually matters, they're properly divorced from the setting, but also not really distinct from Mad Ones except that they have a decent chance of reaching Ascension any day now (and are much more immune to PC action). And if they don't care about the Ascension War because they could override it, rather than them being totally out to lunch, it makes the Pentacle useless for either adventure or horror on the grand scale, since any victories are irrelevant next to a bunch of extradimensional plus-one wizards. I'm sorry to be ornery, and if people are annoyed at this thread I can keep my frustration with archmagi out of here, I just don't really see a way to use them conceptually to improve core Mage gameplay. The best part about Archmagi is that they tend to not care about the day to day existence that comes with being a regular old Pentacle mage. The best part about being a regular old Pentacle mage is that you don't really know what you're missing out on, because if you did, you're more than likely to either ignore it like you're pretending to be a sleeper confronted by magic, or you drive yourself into the ground trying to figure out how to do it yourself. Either way, you can easily keep the scope of your game to not worrying about Ascension because the problems your players will be dealing with are insignificant to Archmagi unless you the GM decide otherwise. tl;dr It's your game, don't handcuff yourself because Archmagi are actually a thing, because you don't have to use them unless you want.
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Dec 29, 2016 01:33
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My GM is planning on running Orpheus soon. I am 100% sure that this is a good thing. He's asked that we stay pretty much 100% ignorant of the metaplot so that we don't get any surprises ruined, and I'm fine with that, but I still want to ask: What are cool things I can do with Orpheus?
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Dec 29, 2016 01:54
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Hattie Masters posted:My GM is planning on running Orpheus soon. I am 100% sure that this is a good thing. He's asked that we stay pretty much 100% ignorant of the metaplot so that we don't get any surprises ruined, and I'm fine with that, but I still want to ask: You ever see the movie Flatliners?
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Dec 29, 2016 01:57
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Daeren posted:You ever see the movie Flatliners? He said cool things.
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Dec 29, 2016 01:57
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:He said cool things. Harsh but fair.
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Dec 29, 2016 01:58
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Mors Rattus posted:Cover was Infrastructure. It isn't any more. When an angel Falls, the Infrastructure that made them and their mission up kind of wraps around them as a sort of protective shell. My take is this is why the Machine often has no idea who a new demon is or what happened to the angel involved or even the project the angel was working on. If anything is the lynchpin for a demon's Cover, it's the demon themselves. The Machine is not organized in a human enough way that it just has a database of Cover identities and all humans ever. It cannot think in terms of individuals. It has statistics - 10% of people are X. X people react Y way. It literally cannot model a single person, just demographics. Oh, RAW that's absolutely the case. I'm probably even going to consider that true in-game, because I don't like messing too much with underlying themes until I've...oh, read the books a second time. This was more an exercise in what an Inquisitor would scrawl on their mental yarn and newspaper clipping board. I'm just very excited about techgnosis, apparently. Thanks for the input! John Wick is an amazing Demon film by the way.
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Dec 29, 2016 03:24
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I've been running a VtM game with a group of friends for the last few months and things are just now starting to hit the fan. It's the one set in Austin, Texas that I've mentioned before. These are all experienced WW players for the most part (I met them back on New Bremen, and STed with two of them on there) so I've been lobbing curveballs and they've just been eating it all up. So far things that have happened include 1) An Assamite Vizier, Embraced in Mexico, slowly realizing that no Assamite that he's spoken to has ever actually claimed to have been to the Mountain save for their sires. This player actually threw my for a curve ball since I had *~PLANS~* for the Assamites - the Assamites are actually a sect proper, with warriors/viziers/sorcerors being made up of Malkavians, Ventrue, Brujah, Toreador, etc - but so far I've been able to rope him along. He's currently a Deputy. 2) A Tremere, who was a CIA operative who took part in the Ghost Tape psy-op program, slowly realizing that the dead Toreador Primogen that everyone was certain was too busy having all the drugs, parties and sex on the planet to actually accomplish anything was actually tapping in to the group consciousness of the herd in rituals ripped straight from the CoX playbook to be able to figure out trends. I also had *~PLANS~* for the Tremere - the Tremere are a secondary sect, made up of Toreador, Ventrue, Malkavians, and Nosferatu - but this person's rolling with it. 3) A meth-dealing Malkavian that's claiming to be the Rightful Baron of Travis County and Surrounding Territories ("I am a free Kindred of the land and I do not create praxis with you!") has turned out to be even more of the crazy guy that they thought. Somehow. The -actual- Baron of Austin hates the guy. 4) Convinced everyone that, as annoyingly self-absorbed as she appears to be and despite how she's literally stacking the court with her childer, the Toreador Prince with the soft touch has still managed to hold the entire city together better than her two rivals would. Keep Austin weird y'all. 5) Everyone had gotten it in their heads that the Tremere Primogen wants them dead but rather than going the crazy bullshit route of killing him instead played hardball politics and now have the powerful Ventrue Primogen on the line. I have never been prouder of my players than when that happened. (Bonus anecdote, from the Assamite player to the Tremere player: "You don't understand. He's a -Ventrue- -Primogen-. Imagine that instead of having Resources as a Background at 5 he had it as a -Discipline- at 5.") 6) Are now trying to arrange things so that the Sheriff (who goes by Dam Fe or "Lady Iron", and who the players keep trying to figure the clan of but is totally-not-a-Lamia) and the local Anarch murder machine (who goes by Rook, loves/respects the local Baron so much that he's basically sacrificed his humanity for the man, and who everyone thinks is a Malkavian and totally-not-a-City-Gangrel) to join forces in storming the Malkavian's compound. 7) Have completely missed out on the fact that the Malkavian Primogen's paranoid ramblings (he's an Alex Jones fan) are hinting at the fact that the Second City is just a metaphor for the cyclical nature of Vampire existence, where the young get more powerful, overthrow/destroy their elders, and replace them/make new clans/bloodlines before falling/being replaced themselves. 8) Have learned that the Camarilla, despite what they've been told, is more of a set up of competing fiefdoms with a shared creation story a la Game of Thrones. 9) Had their Generation "mysteriously" get more powerful by a step, assuming that it's story related and not XP related. tl;dr version: I've got a group of four people who all hate the nWoD to basically be suckered in to playing VtR one session at a time. The best part? All of their talk about canonical stuff and how the clans hold out and act? Totally makes sense as the sort of in-world propaganda that you'd tell your idiot offspring to keep them from figuring out how things -really- work. The one problem that I'm running in to is figuring out -when- to dole out the "mysterious" Generation increases as the XP banks up, or how often. The general idea that I had is that active Vampires would steadily increase in Generation/Potency - it's just that most vampires (i.e., the NPCs) end up being so caught up in their petty struggles/political games that they lose track of that and slowly calcify. All of the petty political bullshit that all of the sects suggest is literally there as a distraction by the Sabbat/Camarilla to keep their underlings powerful but not TOO powerful while the would-be-blood gods keep trying their thing, staving off their own personal Gehenna (i.e., the young rising up against them again a la the Burning Times or the Second City). citybeatnik fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Dec 29, 2016 |
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Dec 29, 2016 03:37
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citybeatnik posted:"You don't understand. He's a -Ventrue- -Primogen-. Imagine that instead of having Resources as a Background at 5 he had it as a -Discipline- at 5." This is great, and I'm surprised it would show up in Masquerade - I always got the sense that high-level vampires in M got things done with magic more than mundane resources, while Requiem was more inclined towards entrenched power through owning a city.
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Dec 29, 2016 04:25
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So I'm doing a write up for a Mage 2e and I'm planning on having an alliance between the Seers and the GM actively working on constructing a massive piece of occult infrastructure (using the St Louis Arch no less) that will have massive implications. The problem i'm running into is that I just can't think of what the infrastructure would actually be trying to accomplish. I've read up on both the God Machine and the Seers, I know that the Demon Storyteller's Guide mentions them working together frequently but I can't find any further detailing of why they would work together or for what kind of projects. I'd also generally like to ask how you would run the God Machine in a Mage chronicle.
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Dec 29, 2016 05:50
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LordAbaddon posted:I've read up on both the God Machine and the Seers, I know that the Demon Storyteller's Guide mentions them working together frequently but I can't find any further detailing of why they would work together or for what kind of projects. Both of them love the Lie - the God-Machine wants to remain hidden because that's more efficient, and the Seers of the Throne exist solely to maintain the Lie. As such, a fun concept might be to start the game with the local population of Sleepers considerably more open to the supernatural than usual. Maybe it's because there was a huge UFO sighting, or maybe someone found a way to sidestep the Sleeping Curse, or maybe it's just that a Demon went waaaay too Loud out in the open. The Pentacle see this as a good thing - it's not specifically Supernal Magic so the Guardians are basically considering this a tool they can use, the Silver Ladder are inserting themselves as experts on the occult in politics, the Mysterium can take surveys, the Free Council is doing a little jig. All that jazz. Obviously, the Seers and the GM are not happy with this. The GM has to take a light hand... and by that we mean the GM is planning on undoing that breach of normalcy by main force, either literally rewriting history around St. Louis or some other magical-equivalent-of-chemtrails method that will cover this up. Local Seers have divined the GM's intent in this case and they think it's just swell, so they'll be running interference and supporting the Infrastructure with their own magic, running triage on the Masquerade. Hope that's useful!
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Dec 29, 2016 06:24
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Joe Slowboat posted:Also, if Vampires can shut down Supernal magic with blood sorcery, can Mages use Awakened Magic to shut down blood sorcery? I feel like there are obvious arcanum/practice combinations to do that, but shied away from the possibility. I'd say it's pretty much up to the ST since I don't think there's been any real in depth examination of how those two forms of magic interact outside of predictable outcomes like "someone is going to get incinerated or sucked dry" in the event the beings wielding them conflict. A supernal mage could probably find a way, though. It's kind of Mage's hat that they have a large bag of potential tricks, even if they can't directly attack the problem at hand. The real problem of any "blood magic versus supernal magic" situation is what horrible side effects a group of mages and vampiric blood mages swinging their dicks at each other would produce. That actually was a minor suggested plot blurb in one of the books from way back in 1e. The canon implications say that it probably doesn't end well for anyone. Doubly so with the inclusion of stuff like Void familiars and the associated cruac style from Secrets of the Covenants. There's no way that any sane or responsible mage wouldn't freak out after seeing a vampire producing some horrific abomination of shadows and mutated flesh every time they cast a spell. Archonex fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Dec 29, 2016 |
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Dec 29, 2016 06:51
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Kibner posted:I love you and your group. Yeah, I'm also a local to the area, and NPCs in the area were down as gently caress to start a new Hubig's. This, at a block party two days after the pack looted a local high school chemistry lab to mix up a phosphorescent compound, that happened to be the Bane of a Claimed from the deep sewers. Said Claimed was a living mass of semi-solid lard and grease, that finally oozed out of a broken, abandoned sewer pipe into an abandoned warehouse in Gretna. The locals commented about a fire in said warehouse in the news the next morning. Gretna smelled like a deep fryer for the next two weeks. edit: The pack swiftly took to a particular name for it: the Obeselisk.
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Dec 29, 2016 09:04
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Joe Slowboat posted:This seems clearly true, but they also really seem to completely trivialize normal Mage-level play, which means that I'm really inclined as a GM to quietly erase them from the cosmology. Has anyone run into this in actual play? It's possible I'm worrying over nothing, but I have at least one player really prone to focusing on high-level elements (he played a Sidereal in a local adventuring-Solars game in Exalted, for example) and Archmages have already come up in concept, and I would prefer to focus on the Seers of the Throne and the Tremere and the like, which all seem to be rendered irrelevant by the existence of Archmages. It's possible what Tremere do to their soul and gnosis means they can't become archmages. I don't think we've said anywhere. The Pax and certain other setting elements (like the fact that the Pentacle explicitly ban archmasters from holding political office) are designed to keep them from acting like Mage: The Ascension archmasters, where they sat in Horizon Realms and gave PC-level characters their marching orders. Archmasters are, outside the niche of a niche of playing them, in the game to serve as Merlins, Kosh Naraneks, and the like. If you can find an entrance to a Chantry (and the owner is not hostile) they fit into a chronicle as advisory npcs. They can't spam miracle-level spells on a pc's behalf because they require Quintessence, which allows for pcs to go on quests for whatever their archmaster mentor needs to help out, and don't interfere with the affairs of lesser mages because of the Pax. Which stereotypically leads to them breaking the Pax once on behalf of the pcs when it's really, really important, and then... Well... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnD1p4-8c5Y&t=75s
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Dec 29, 2016 10:27
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Can you tell us more about the Tremere in the new Mage?
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Dec 29, 2016 10:39
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RBA-Wintrow posted:Can you tell us more about the Tremere in the new Mage? Rather than being a Legacy that breaks almost every rule of Legacy design, they're a modified template like Mad Ones; Houses (like Nagaraja or Seo Hel) are the Tremere equivalent of Legacies, which have fewer Attainment slots. And then the Tremere organisation is also a Nameless Order.
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Dec 29, 2016 10:45
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Breaking from magechat again briefly, one recurring enigma in VtM was Hardestadt - and more specifically, how Hardestadt the Younger maintained his guise as the Elder. The biggest problem was always the generation of childer - it's something that can actually be quantified by the Tremere, and we have no indication that HtY is a diablerist (he probably is anyway with how readily he embraced it as a cure to the withering). But hidden away in the revised core is a reference to six other childer of HtE, and they're all blood bound to HtY. This means we have a solution to the generation issue if HtY does not directly embrace any of his childer but uses his bloodbound 'siblings' to do so (he could even keep them in torpor the rest of the time), with the end result being that the lines those childer spawn will all point back to 'Hardestadt' with the right generation to help obscure the issue if they're ever examined. Given that HtY is also a founder of the Camarilla and was directly involved in the fight against the Assamites, this would give him a secondary protection of no small value. Assamite sorcerers can work magic on entire lineages of varying degrees of severity. If HtY is sitting next to that lineage, he is largely immune to that magic since his sire and grandsire are beyond their reach, so he can only be affected by his own childer and their childer. Thus, not only does using this sidestep prevent him from being exposed as easily, it also provides protection against the sorcery of the Assamites and some of the Tremere's rituals, which provides a very real motive to keep it secret that he is not the actual Hardestadt.
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Dec 29, 2016 13:57
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Joe Slowboat posted:This seems clearly true, but they also really seem to completely trivialize normal Mage-level play, which means that I'm really inclined as a GM to quietly erase them from the cosmology. Has anyone run into this in actual play? It's possible I'm worrying over nothing, but I have at least one player really prone to focusing on high-level elements (he played a Sidereal in a local adventuring-Solars game in Exalted, for example) and Archmages have already come up in concept, and I would prefer to focus on the Seers of the Throne and the Tremere and the like, which all seem to be rendered irrelevant by the existence of Archmages. Archmasters don't trivialize normal Mage-level play that much because they don't interact with it all that much. Although, one of the biggest changes between the setting of 1e and 2e (imo) is that in the 1e corebook, Archmasters are these mythical, rumoured things that nobody knows even exist for sure whereas in the 2e corebook it's suggested that in every Consilium, if you have a problem, if noone else can help and if you can find them, maybe you can call the A-Team. In that it's very much a nudge-nudge-wink-wink Jupiter used to be a high-up Magister in the Silver Ladder but then he had to retire for personal reasons nudge nudge wink wink and he's *cough*definitelynotanarchmasternow*cough* but push comes to shove, your PCs do know somebody who can put them in touch with an archmaster. Aside from giving Mages a long term game plan and being a surprisingly compelling optional subgame, Archmasters are mainly there to provide that little extra deus ex machina for those really intractable problems. "We go questing to find an archmaster, convince him to help us and then do high-level raids to get them the Magic Juice needed for them to cast an arch-spell to solve our problem" becomes a valid solution for when the party are really stuck for ideas. It's not simple, by any means, but it is fun. Hattie Masters posted:My GM is planning on running Orpheus soon. I am 100% sure that this is a good thing. He's asked that we stay pretty much 100% ignorant of the metaplot so that we don't get any surprises ruined, and I'm fine with that, but I still want to ask: I will always stand by Witch-Fire, for emergency lightning making GBS threads. Otherwise body puppeteering is basically the most powerful tool in an Orpheus agent's arsenal, and Juggernaught is famously borderline-OP because it gives you stats and multiple actions. Basically any given espionage related task can probably be solved by one or two Orpheus agents using only the most basic of their powers because ghosts, yo. LordAbaddon posted:So I'm doing a write up for a Mage 2e and I'm planning on having an alliance between the Seers and the GM actively working on constructing a massive piece of occult infrastructure (using the St Louis Arch no less) that will have massive implications. The problem i'm running into is that I just can't think of what the infrastructure would actually be trying to accomplish. I've read up on both the God Machine and the Seers, I know that the Demon Storyteller's Guide mentions them working together frequently but I can't find any further detailing of why they would work together or for what kind of projects. I'd also generally like to ask how you would run the God Machine in a Mage chronicle. The standard is "summon a really big angel". Like if the God-Machine decided a particular high-level Mage needs to die to accomplish <Task> and realised that the best way to do this is summon a Rank 6+ Destroyer, and is slowly putting together the pieces to do this. The target is 100% aware of whatever he did to piss the god-machine off and is staying quiet so nobody complains at him, but the evidence is there if the PCs go looking. All the God-Machine needs is that Mage dead/gone and the clock is ticking before the T-1000 shows up. Alternatively, maybe the God-Machine needs to do some spring-cleaning in the local Temenos of the city so the Infrastructure is to open up a big, real-world portal into the Astral Realms. This is so far beyond the pale of what the Mages know that they won't even know wtf. The God-Machine's plan is to send a fleet of physical angels bodily through the portal into the Astral Realms to make all the alterations it wants to in the area. Foreshadow this by having the local Consilium be really loving confused that they keep running into obviously physical beings in the Astral (there's an angelic Numina which can open up portals to any realm. The Astral Realms and the Abyss are explicitly called out as possible destinations) which seem to be trying to make changes to the local Temenos, but not very effectively. Alternatively, some of the Infrastructure I've had in my game: The Akashic Records data archive, which is used as a piece of Logistics Infrastructure. The attached machine cult kidnaps occultly significant people and feeds them into the machine, which juices them for their memories, which it then stores. This piece of infrastructure was critical to the climax of my Requiem Methuselahs game, where the party a) used it to get all their Fog of Aged memories back, b) share all their relevant memories (and skill dots) with each other, c) juiced their enemies and read their memories and d) set it up so the entirety of their bloodlines showed up to receive all the combat skill dots of the Amara Havana founder before the final fights. The London Eye, which is a piece of Surveillance Infrastructure designed to keep track of Essence expenditure across the Shadow and Twilight of the city. It's the God-Machine's primary way of keeping track of Spirits and Ghosts in the area, but can of course be tapped into by Demons and used to spy on Angels. Grenwich Observatory, which is a deliberately leaky and inefficient piece of Surveillance Infrastructure used to deliberately create as many cryptids in the local pigeon population as possible, so the on-site hunter angel with Influence: Pigeons can use them as Aether-sniffing bloodhounds and attack dogs. The London Underground, whose routes act something like a keypad code - following the right routes in the right directions in the right order take you to specific God-Machine Facilities. The weird street translocation sigils which are one of the Mysteries of London in the Mage 2E corebook are a byproduct of the code for this Infrastructure leaking beyond the bounds of the Underground, in my game.
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Dec 29, 2016 14:32
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Doodmons posted:Alternatively, maybe the God-Machine needs to do some spring-cleaning in the local Temenos of the city so the Infrastructure is to open up a big, real-world portal into the Astral Realms. This is so far beyond the pale of what the Mages know that they won't even know wtf. The God-Machine's plan is to send a fleet of physical angels bodily through the portal into the Astral Realms to make all the alterations it wants to in the area. Foreshadow this by having the local Consilium be really loving confused that they keep running into obviously physical beings in the Astral (there's an angelic Numina which can open up portals to any realm. The Astral Realms and the Abyss are explicitly called out as possible destinations) which seem to be trying to make changes to the local Temenos, but not very effectively.
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Dec 29, 2016 15:24
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citybeatnik posted:-Awesome things- That's amazing. All the canonical stuff is what kept and keeps me from playing VtM. It's a great idea, but my brain meats aren't interested and/or capable of remembering all those things. It also runs in the face of me thinking "the characters are right here, to hell with canon." But that's the groups that I ended up encountering, not the canon's fault. As for XP and Generation/BP bumps, you can go on a fractional basis or keep it in line with the story for when their blood might thicken. Going as a fraction I've seen accomplished pretty well, and I think bumping it up when you hit the threshold works pretty well. I think it was somewhere around 1/4 of the Blood XP for each normal XP. But I cannot honestly remember what it was. I do remember that it was somewhere around 80-90 XP where you could go from BP2 - BP3, but that's the best I can do without trying to do math early in the morning. 96xp, that was where you could go to BP3, so it was set at 1/4. That way by the time you had somewhere in the range of 200+ XP, you'd be pushing Elder powerstat, but the increases would slow down between levels which kept it from running away too quickly. This was VtR math though, so I'm not sure how you'd convert that to Masquerade math.
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Dec 29, 2016 16:07
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Joe Slowboat posted:This is great, and I'm surprised it would show up in Masquerade - I always got the sense that high-level vampires in M got things done with magic more than mundane resources, while Requiem was more inclined towards entrenched power through owning a city. It helps that most of the interactions everyone has had involves the Kindred of the city and not the Kine, so pulling out Disciplines don't work as well. Austin's also written as being massively over-populated with vampires. Power's actually a theme in the game, as well as how you use it. - The Baron has sway; he's genuinely well liked by everyone that meets him as an upstanding man and level-headed, and has been investing in the poorer people in the city so he's got lots of little favors that he can call on. The problem with that is, of course, that while he's well liked he's not necessarily -respected- by the vampires since he's just a little too humane. If this was a happier story he'd win out. But it's not a happy story. He's also had his power base cut out from underneath him thanks to gentrification and other problems. - The Ventrue Primogen has control - he buys and sells businesses, property, and people. He's ruthless but also honest, and treats people under him at least reasonably well as long as they know their place. The problem is that this way of thinking, of overt control and power, doesn't really work in this modern age of technology. - The Toreador Prince has influence - she's carefully put people in to positions throughout the city and is playing a long game where she keeps the city just lax enough that everyone involved wants to keep things the way they are. The problem with that is that she doesn't necessarily have enough pull to quickly throw down. That and it requires rational actors. The Baron's actually a Ventrue as well, but more heavily invested in Presence than Dominate. It also helps that out of the four characters, only one is a Ventrue. The other three are an Assamite Vizier, a Tremere, and a Nosferatu. Jhet posted:That's amazing. All the canonical stuff is what kept and keeps me from playing VtM. It's a great idea, but my brain meats aren't interested and/or capable of remembering all those things. It also runs in the face of me thinking "the characters are right here, to hell with canon." But that's the groups that I ended up encountering, not the canon's fault. Yeah, my take on canon is that it's all fine and good until it gets in your way. It might irk some people but if you get them invested in the story first then when they find out the big reveal they're along for the ride. I'm also more of a reactive Storyteller - I have a general theme/plot that I'm going with but it's all based off of what the characters do. And I make poo poo up on the fly. I gave everyone their first Generation bump at ~40xp, and they're now all sitting at 10th generation. But that's mostly because they all came in at 11th Generation or there abouts. I'm thinking that a bump every 40xp or so should work out, but I might play with the math a bit.
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Dec 29, 2016 17:06
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