|
Apologies if this has been covered (I scanned the previous few pages) but it looks like there's some sort of effort to print cards for V:TES again? Did the rights to that game change hands or something? Is it coming back into actual print?
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2017 23:36
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 10:40 |
|
|
My understanding is that the rights to the game have lapsed and some other people have picked it up, however they don't have the rights to the Deckmaster license so they need to change some of the copyrighted terms like "Tap" and such.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2017 23:56
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:My understanding is that the rights to the game have lapsed and some other people have picked it up, however they don't have the rights to the Deckmaster license so they need to change some of the copyrighted terms like "Tap" and such. Ah, yeah that makes sense. Is this the same people that actually own the WW IPs?
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 00:58
|
|
|
I Am Just a Box posted:This is the bit that stood out to me: they started development the same day the game was announced. That's insane unless they plan to make it a visual novel or a cookie clicker or something.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 01:06
|
|
|
Is the situation really that bad? I'd have thought Paradox wouldn't go off quarter-cocked like this.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 01:16
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:My understanding is that the rights to the game have lapsed and some other people have picked it up, however they don't have the rights to the Deckmaster license so they need to change some of the copyrighted terms like "Tap" and such. They can use floop
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 01:30
|
|
|
The 'game' is a poster, a press release, and whatever's in Martin's head. That's the same level of preparedness I bring to a tabletop game, and there's a reason most of mine collapse.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 01:52
|
|
|
Loomer posted:The 'game' is a poster, a press release, and whatever's in Martin's head. That's the same level of preparedness I bring to a tabletop game, and there's a reason most of mine collapse. Is it the weekly drills on vampire genealogy?
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 02:01
|
|
|
I'm running a Mage game set in Australia in a few weeks. While I have a few story ideas in the can, I thought I'd see if any goons have any goony ideas for plot hooks. Serious or funny, I don't care. As long as every third through seventh word isn't "shrimp on the barbie", it's good.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 02:05
|
|
|
Loomer posted:The 'game' is a poster, a press release, and whatever's in Martin's head. That's the same level of preparedness I bring to a tabletop game, and there's a reason most of mine collapse. I too issue a press release before each of my games.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 02:08
|
|
|
Axelgear posted:I'm running a Mage game set in Australia in a few weeks. While I have a few story ideas in the can, I thought I'd see if any goons have any goony ideas for plot hooks. Serious or funny, I don't care. As long as every third through seventh word isn't "shrimp on the barbie", it's good. *Cracks open Rage Across Australia while spirits wail in the background, turns to a random page* Sentient evil asbestos mine.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 02:19
|
|
|
Axelgear posted:I'm running a Mage game set in Australia in a few weeks. While I have a few story ideas in the can, I thought I'd see if any goons have any goony ideas for plot hooks. Serious or funny, I don't care. As long as every third through seventh word isn't "shrimp on the barbie", it's good. Midnight Oil is a Libertine Cabal that's been compromised by an Intruder. Steve Irwin never really died; he was simply taken. A tortured and hideous manta-man builds a kingdom in the ruins of the Great Barrier Reef and plots his imminent vengeance. A cult's trapped the ghost of Gough Whitlam, who so maintained his rage that he could never pass on, and is using it to drive the city of Melbourne to a murderous fever pitch.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 02:36
|
|
|
Axelgear posted:I'm running a Mage game set in Australia in a few weeks. While I have a few story ideas in the can, I thought I'd see if any goons have any goony ideas for plot hooks. Serious or funny, I don't care. As long as every third through seventh word isn't "shrimp on the barbie", it's good. There's a mythological creature called a Quinkin, which is basically a shadow person who is vulnerable to Lasers (created by refracted light from quartz near fires, but I'm sure your players will find an alternative) The Mouth of the Yarra River in Melbourne is blocked by Crown Casino, which has resulted in really lovely water quality. There's also lots of myths about rivers being created by, as well as being massive serpents in the Dreamtime, so there's that to work with. There's the Dream Time, which is kinda like the God-Time from Glorantha. It's a complicated thing and I really don't want to disrespect it so do some research into that. There's a lot of desert, have people come back wierd from going walkabout. Other than that there's a lot of greek, italian, chinese and jewish immigrants so you can draw from those myths easily. Less serious: The Melbourne vs Sydney Test match (cricket) isn't ending. It's entering it's second week and some magical bullshit is afoot. Can the Mages save Australia from watching a lovely sport? People are, for whatever reason, becoming More and More Australian: drinking and swearing more, speaking in more deranged analogies and carrying bigger knives. Some magical bullshit is probably afoot. Can the Mages save Australia from themselves? Wrestlepig fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Feb 9, 2017 |
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 02:42
|
|
|
Axelgear posted:I'm running a Mage game set in Australia in a few weeks. While I have a few story ideas in the can, I thought I'd see if any goons have any goony ideas for plot hooks. Serious or funny, I don't care. As long as every third through seventh word isn't "shrimp on the barbie", it's good. Old or new? Either way - there's scant, but compelling, evidence of a witchery in convict Tasmania. All kinds of crazy poo poo can flow from the combination of 'mist-shrouded island', 'clash between an extinguished colonized people and the oppressed prisoners of the oppressors', 'cannibal escapees', 'brutal, horrifying prison that is definitely haunted' and 'secret witch cult among the ancestors of the current inhabitants'. You can also harvest the Kettering Incident for ideas! Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:I too issue a press release before each of my games. I hype mine up for my crew of regular players with snippets and photoshopped posters. Close enough, right?
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 02:48
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:*Cracks open Rage Across Australia while spirits wail in the background, turns to a random page* You know, there's a town in Quebec called Asbestos.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 02:50
|
|
|
Loomer posted:I hype mine up for my crew of regular players with snippets and photoshopped posters. Close enough, right? I've always assumed you were pretty much the DM from Chick's Dark Dungeons pamphlets only with elaborate family trees covering all the walls.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 02:51
|
|
|
MonsieurChoc posted:You know, there's a town in Quebec called Asbestos. No, seriously.  
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 03:27
|
|
|
Axelgear posted:I'm running a Mage game set in Australia in a few weeks. While I have a few story ideas in the can, I thought I'd see if any goons have any goony ideas for plot hooks. Serious or funny, I don't care. As long as every third through seventh word isn't "shrimp on the barbie", it's good. Reference the Voice of the Angel. What do the Anangu know from their compact with the Ancient One, and what works does it project around the vicinity of Uluru that produce reports of dancing lights and strange sounds? There is an anomalous network of caverns extending deep beneath what is otherwise the middle of scorched nowhere. Its tunnels wind in ways that distort the normal workings of space, and the few sorcerers who have braved it since its discovery have brought back incomplete maps which nevertheless trace sigils recognizable in the High Speech, as well as artifacts that defy the local environment: wrought iron statues dated thousands of years too old, fossilized remains of unrecognizable variations on freshwater life far from any lake or groundwater reservoir. And a petrochemical company has just obtained permission to begin expansive drilling there.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 03:47
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:No, seriously. Oh no, I believed you. I was simply thinking about how this stupid plot point could also be used in my own province.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 03:53
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:No, seriously. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofrqm6-LCqs
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 03:58
|
|
|
While we're there, for a piece of pure evil that you'd think was over the top if it was Pentex doing it, here downunder the asbestos mining companies knew it was dangerous to be around in the 50s and 60s. So they gave the white men breathing masks, and hired more blackfellas. When the blackfellas asked 'is this okay for us? Why've you got a mask on?', they told them - at that point, most of their blackfella workers weren't particularly well educated and weren't really in an economic position to be picky anyway - 'you're safe, it doesn't hurt aboriginals'. Yeah.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 04:07
|
|
|
Axelgear posted:I'm running a Mage game set in Australia in a few weeks. While I have a few story ideas in the can, I thought I'd see if any goons have any goony ideas for plot hooks. Serious or funny, I don't care. As long as every third through seventh word isn't "shrimp on the barbie", it's good. If I ever get my Melbourne-mage game off the ground (in my RPG group it's referred to as the "i have a dream" game because it never ends up being the right time to start it), Tasmania is basically the equivalent of 'taking the black' and going to the Wall in Game of Thrones. The wide stretches of national parkland combined with the crappy history of the island (penal colony of a penal colony, genocide) mean that wounds are still scattered around the island, leaving nasty spirits about. Meanwhile, Tasmania still goddamn Tasmania with all the poo poo that real-world Tasmania implies. So the rest of the Australian Consilii (Tasmania doesn't have an officially recognised one) have set up a roaming cabal of mages to move around Tasmania (technically under Melbourne's jurisdiction, for reasons of proximity) and try to keep things stable and maybe eventually heal things, and it's also their job to watch for new Awakenings and get them proper tutelage and Order membership elsewhere. 'Going South' is considered an honorable way to 'serve your sentence' for a crime, and can sometimes be selected when the guilty party feels a particular punishment strongly goes against their beliefs, i.e. "I'm not giving Ordos tass as a repayment for accidentally paradoxing his house, he's an rear end in a top hat and he deserved it. I'll go south for a year."
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 04:09
|
|
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr6w9eniyls
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 04:15
|
|
|
Also Australian plot hook: In the 1850s, decently-sized amounts of Chinese immigrants came to Australia in search of gold (and some mages popped along too). Many of them eventually left, but some stayed, especially in the traditional Goldfields areas, and the White Australia policy meant that until the 70s they didn't have the opportunity to invite others from the old country to join them. Now today, Chinese cabals are suddenly popping down to investigate as it turns out that Joe Chang of Emu Creek, descended from the original gold rush immigrants and as culturally Australian as binge drinking, doesn't just have "some cool weird legacy me uncle taught me", but an ancient and (in?)famous Chinese Legacy steeped in tradition and history, thought lost for almost two centuries.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 04:32
|
|
|
You can do something similar with Afghani camel drivers who came in the same time and set up some charmingly tiny little country mosques, too. Great fun for taking the piss out of the whole 'muslims should go back home' bullshit.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 04:46
|
|
|
You'd have to find it but SOMEWHERE on these god forsaken forums, someone did a big post about how large parts of Australia were literally founded by occult believers, and some of the cities were build to their specification and there's real life occult poo poo all over the drat place because the non-criminal European settlers were batshit insane.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 05:06
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:You'd have to find it but SOMEWHERE on these god forsaken forums, someone did a big post about how large parts of Australia were literally founded by occult believers, and some of the cities were build to their specification and there's real life occult poo poo all over the drat place because the non-criminal European settlers were batshit insane. That'd be in friendly local occultist lunatic Loomer's post history.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 05:19
|
|
|
bewilderment posted:If I ever get my Melbourne-mage game off the ground (in my RPG group it's referred to as the "i have a dream" game because it never ends up being the right time to start it), Tasmania is basically the equivalent of 'taking the black' and going to the Wall in Game of Thrones. This is loving cool and I want to adapt it to the next game I run.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 05:30
|
|
|
Good grief, I look away for an hour and a half to do some reading and come back to find some serious gold. I haven't got the Post History upgrade, so if anyone can link me to that actual Australian occultism malarky, that'd be great. I knew some old English conjurework made it to Australia but I never knew about that level of it. I'm pretty interested in examining Australia's non-European migrant past, too. I've already laid down that the Guardians of the Veil faction in the region is partly descended from Javanese refugees who fled their home after the Dutch conquests in the early 1800s and whose descendants eventually arrived in Australia some decades later. I'll look into the history of Chinese and Afghan migrants too, and see how they might blend into things. I'm still really, really not sure how to present native Australians. Every bit of research I've done into it has kind of unveiled a new layer of lovely and awful, re: their treatment by Europeans, and it's a topic I don't really want to do anything to be disrespectful on, but ignoring it would be just that. It's going to be tricky. I've definitely included the idea of Dreamtime in the setting, though, focusing on the concept of sacred sites and songlines. There's an obscure bit in the Astral Realms book, how, if you are in a representative region, you can jump straight into that part of the Astral (such as by jumping into the Realm of Death by touching a corpse). Australia's littered with these sorts of places. There's also a bunch of big setting Mysteries I lumped in, all tied up in that. I'm totally using the sentient asbestos mine. Also, I get the feeling I should look into Tasmania more. No peeking, Ironslave.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 05:50
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:You'd have to find it but SOMEWHERE on these god forsaken forums, someone did a big post about how large parts of Australia were literally founded by occult believers, and some of the cities were build to their specification and there's real life occult poo poo all over the drat place because the non-criminal European settlers were batshit insane. Daeren posted:That'd be in friendly local occultist lunatic Loomer's post history. Yeah, that was me, so dig about in my post history. For further reference, there's always the book Other Temples, Other Gods, which is sadly the only comprehensive esoteric history of the land downunder (and sorely lacking and quite dated, as it's from 1982, but a good source of ideas), New Dawn magazine, and anything on Rosaleen Norton. Unfortunately, for a nation with a long whitefella occult and esoteric history stretching back to the first fleet - and longer, when we include the sacred traditions and mythology of the blackfellas - we don't have a lot published and a lot of it is still kept as sort of 'family secret' whispers that 'great-aunt rebecca from italy was a witch, you know', local folklore that isn't written down outside of a handful of local historian's documents that aren't digitized or published online, and old diaries never fully catalogued. There are some fine works on modern neopaganism in the country, at least, and Aussie names crop up very regularly in broader occult circles - if you do any amount of research into high ritual magic, solomonic magic, etc, you'll run into our mr. Stephen Skinner, who's probably the most significant name on that front.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 06:02
|
|
|
Awesome! Thanks, I'll look into those, maybe even this weekend.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 06:05
|
|
|
Since you don't have posthistory, have a repost. "Don't forget Australia. When it comes to magic places, we got it in spades since we were born in the Age of Aquarius as a nation. Lots and lots of occultists packed up and moved here or sent their students and disciples to open branches. It's why one of the largest broadcast stations in the country, 2GB, is named for Giordano Bruno, half our first few PMs and Founders were Theosophists, Canberra actually was designed with occult architecture in mind unlike DC, with the architect for the city becoming an anthroposophist. We built huge open air ampitheatres in anticipation of the arrival of a great teacher. What I'm saying is Australian history is a vast and usually untapped resource for occult inspiration. As a nation, we had - and still have - strong links and associations with a lot of weird poo poo. ******* I'm going to avoid going into indigenous magical tradition here because most of what's written about it isn't great, being either outdated or blatantly incorrect, and what few practices I am personally privy to are sacred and not to be shared. That said, the book 'Aboriginal Men of High Degree' is worth reading with the caveat it tends to be a little 'universalist' - but as a product of the 1950s it is a remarkably sensitive, reasonable, sympathetic approach to the subject of indigenous customary magic, spirituality, and practice, all of which may be of some use. The dreamtime especially is a beautiful way of understanding how other worlds can simultaneously exist overlapping with our own, interacting with it while being distinct, operating on their own laws and customs. The popular whitefella conception of it is 'a past place' but it's actually a past, present, and future all overlapping simultaneously. Even the term dreamtime isn't quite right, but it's what we use now for it. Either way, I'll mostly be focusing on the whitefella's experience of magic in Australia. Let's start with Crowley and Frank Bennett. Bennett was an English-born Aussie who was part of the theosophical society, Co-Masonry (Freemasonry, but with ladies as well as men), the A:.A:. and the OTO. He moved here in 1911 with the express goal of starting up more co-masonic lodges in Australia, which he did quite handily (and if ever a society has lead to greater cross-pollination of esotericism and occultism with a broad swathe of society than Freemasonry in all its forms in the late 19th and early 20th century, I can't think of it) and served as the GM of it here, before resigning and rejoining the OTO. He started the first OTO temple in Australia in Sydney, served as the leader of the Order here for seven years, then went to the Abbey in person where Crowley made him one of his closest advisors. Officially, they dissolved in 1922 after an expose, but even that has a great story seed - sinister occultists going into hiding, starting their own hidden sects in pursuit of strange ends. On the subject of Canberra's architecture, Walter Burley Griffin was an American architect who won a contest to design the city, along with his wife. Both of them were strong believers in sacred architecture, practiced as theosophists, and later became Anthroposophists in the 20s, in Sydney which saw a sudden boost of theosophists, anthroposophists, and Christian Scientists in the early 20s (say, isn't that right around the time when Bennett 'dismissed' the Australian OTO?) His design was essentially that of a great pyramid consisting of smaller pyramids, pentagrams, and circles, a cosmic city for what he saw as the potential greatest nation because of its time, place, and circumstance - a nation that needed the right kind of symbolic architecture to be pushed in the right direction. The city's entire design was meant to come to a final point in the proposed Capitol building, a public meeting space as well as one for politics, with all the energies of the young nation pooling and swelling in it. The whole thing was to be built around feng shui and sacred geometry, containing multiple hidden symbols and sigils in the street layout. Unfortunately, the design wound up being only partly used, so instead of a new consciousness for a new race of people (we'll get to that one shortly) we've wound up with one of the most blatantly corrupt western parliaments anywhere. That in itself is a huge possible story for Demon, for Mage, even for Vampire - what was planned, what actually happened, and who did it? Who shifted the design, who shitcanned the Griffins behind the scenes, who made sure the new design would be psychically polluting? For Demon especially, the mind races to the possibility of a similar city where nearly everything wrong is because demons decades ago subverted the God-Machine's plans for a colossal piece of infrastructure by making sure the 'wrong' architect won. Other places they built encode pythagorean and platonic ideals and symbols in hidden ways, like Melbourne's Capitol theatre and their various Incinerators. Now, that whole 'new race' thing. Theosophy has the idea that there are 7 'root races' - seven stages of human spiritual evolution, basically. The fifth was the modern man in all his kinds (except asians, who were of the fourth root race, which didn't suggest inferiority but is certainly a rather unfortunate aspect of that whole 'it was the 1800s' thing), and had multiple subraces. Blavatsky saw the most important subrace of the fifth root race emerging here in Australia and New Zealand, where by the synthesis of the fourth and fifth roots together, a superior kind of human being would emerge, nourished by the perfect storm of spiritual forces in the nation. One of her disciples said we would be possessed of psychic powers and the power to synthesize the contradictory and the absurd into coherency, and if that doesn't sound like a mage I don't know what does. The nation itself, along with New Zealand, was supposed to itself be of a superior developing kind, born of all the glory of the now with a chance not to make the mistakes of the past, to seize man's destiny! All pretty inspiring stuff, but unfortunately we didn't take it. There's a quote that I like about what happened, since they spoke of shortsighted greed infecting us and turning us from spiritual advancement to material glory, and of how we had to be vigilant as a nation. The quote isn't by them, but it's about that stage of our history. "It looked as though in the contest between Mammon and ‘millennial Eden’ Mammon had won. The dreams of all those who had migrated to the great south land had evaporated. The Aborigine had been corrupted and debased by contact with the white man... Mammon had infected the ancient continent of Australia. The dreams of humanity had ended in an age of ruins." That's Manning Clark. His work has flaws, but he had a great turn of phrase and sense of poetry. Now, if memory serves hubris and the Fall of human potential is a big deal in nMage, yeah? Well, how about an entire nation that rose as a new Atlantis only to collapse in on itself, overwhelmed by pettiness and spite, its secret orders collapsing and running to the shadows, its great symbolic capitol debased by lesser plans? You can't get better than that for making the old new and the new old. Moving to an older, less grand model of esotericism and occultism: cunning folk and hedge craft. Our historians keep finding just plain weird-rear end poo poo whenever they do a dig on settler cottages. Witch bottles, sacrificed cats, buried talismans, the SATOR AREPO carved on pillars, etc. This is where I'm going to note the importance of where most early Australian settlers came from: Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall and Yorkshire. Those same places kept the 'cunning folk' tradition alive in Britain longer than anywhere else, and you can still find remnant traces of it there, but most especially over in the Ozarks and Appalachians in America (which share the same migration pattern) - and a whole lot of what they keep digging up is very close to stuff we have records of from the Appalachian region. So, for early settlers, you've got a strange landscape populated by a superstitious people who practice small charms and rituals on a regular basis. All kinds of neat backwoods poo poo you can work with there, especially with the interplay with indigenous spirituality - which is underrecognized but had a major role in determining the early Australian mindset, and is part of why we do an awful lot of magical realism stuff in our media without even thinking it's unusual. It's that same contact and cross-pollination that made us an especially fertile ground (along with the theosophists, Golden Dawners, Rosicrucians and Crowleyites earlier) for neopaganism when it came knocking in the 50s. We had neo-Odinism before it was cool, Wiccans found a bunch of people doing similar stuff already and subsumed them in, and by the time the 'new age' started we were already pretty well established." If you're going to touch on the Dreamtime, one piece of advice is to recognize that it simultaneously was and is - that is, it exists both in the past and the present as a spiritual 'overworld' that rests inside, around, beneath, and throughout our physical world. As for the indigenous peoples, so long as you're treating them with as much respect as possible, you're probably fine. You'll definitely get most of it wrong - as whitefellas, we pretty much can't not, as we aren't privy to 99% of sacred teachings, and an unfortunately large number of them have been lost forever. There are three pieces of major advice I can give. First, remember that they are people the same as anyone else - there are good blackfellas and bad blackfellas, and most sit somewhere in the middle, trying to be good but not always being good. There are the usual struggles of a colonized people in a low socioeconomic bracket as well. One mistake I see fairly often is ignoring the problems and emphasizing the good, but the reality is that us whitefellas really did a number on most of the blackfellas families so there's a lot of generational trauma and PTSD feeding into those communities problems as well. Before we came, things were not idyllic either - a glance at dreaming stories will show a lot of them deal with misbehaving people doing awful things, and that's why I raise the point of 'don't ignore the problems', whether modern or in the past. Essentially, don't Noble Savage it. Two, most blackfellas live westernized lives, either happily or unhappily. Those still living on their customary lands and by their customary ways are the minority, and the majority of that minority have also adopted quite a lot of modern ideas and technology either willingly or unwillingly. Your average blackfella is more likely to eat a lamb chop he got at Coles or the butcher's than he is to eat kangaroo on any given wednesday - unless he's somewhere kangaroo is cheap and/or trendy, anyway. For a personal anecdote, I was having a chat once with a blackfella I know when an old whitefella friend of the family asked a question about indigenous custom and assumed the blackfella would know. His answer was a perfectly deadpan 'I dunno, I was raised by white people.' and that kind of assimilation is far from uncommon, especially since it was government policy for many years. Three, make sure to look into the specific dreaming of the people wherever your game is set if possible - indigenous mythology is far from universal, even in 'fundamental' aspects like the Rainbow Serpent (who appears, but takes on very different roles, in most every tribal grouping's set of myths and beliefs. Try and learn whatever you can of the local law as well, since law, magic, and wisdom were fundamentally intertwined in pre-settlement Australia. For a recommendation that might put an interesting perspective forth compared to the usual, give Black Emu, Dark Seeds by Bruce Pascoe a read. It goes into the compelling evidence for a long history of settlement, agriculture, and fish farming by the indigenous peoples of the continent that contradicts the usual narrative and lends itself nicely to Mage games of both old and new. The Man Who Sold His Dreaming is also an invaluable read when you're going to touch on the subject. Loomer fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Feb 9, 2017 |
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 06:22
|
|
|
Forgot julian assange. What are the Darque Wikileaks?
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 06:26
|
|
|
Fun fact. Julian Assange was raised partly in, partly on the run from a cult known as the Family, who practiced suspiciously MKULTRA-esque mind control on their members and were supplied with large quantities of LSD at low, low prices by the CIA's own supplier, Sandoz. The leader of the cult took a number of children, dyed their hair blonde, got them false passports, and dressed them androgynously in order to smuggle them in and out of the country as each other as and when needed. Good Ol' Julian's hair is a remnant of that practice, and if a mage or demon ST can't turn that into something to use, they aren't trying hard enough.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 06:30
|
|
|
You're a Godsend, Loomer. Godssend? Anyway. It sounds like I'm on the right track for at least some of this, but I am genuinely staggered to hear how much weird crap there was going on in Australia. I knew the New Age movement bloomed on the Great Southern Continent but I never knew it bloomed that much. I may need to revise my Guardians a bit on that alone. The game's set in New South Wales, so the mythology I've been trying to dig into is primarily the Noongar people, I believe? If you know anything about them specifically, it'd be neat to hear. As for Canberra... I am so pleased to hear about that (well, in terms of game stuff, at least; an occult city would've been neat). One of the big setting Mysteries I have is that Australia as a whole has some kinda messed-up ley lines, the fast flow of which contribute to its inland desertification (and, yes, I know the real reasons are climatological, but those are two descriptions of the same phenomenon for wizards). Australia is a place deprived of Mana and loci except for a handful of places - invariably places that are sacred, because the welling of Mana also brings with it a welling of life; water pools, life flourishes, etc. - and all those ley lines converge somewhere off the coast, deep underwater. Mages have tried repeatedly to adjust the ley lines and failed, because something keeps adjusting them. No-one knows what. Local Awakened postulate some intelligent entity - because that's what wizards do - as a kind of cosmological necessity. The old name for it is the Gallang Gallang (the Cicada), but most Mages today call it the Drinker. (This, in turn, drives one of the other features of the setting; Dreamborn patrons, who trade access to Mana for service.) One of my players also wants a Seer rival in government, so having Canberra as a Seer stronghold is just... Perfect. I love it. Whether they're the ones responsible for the architecture, though, is another matter entirely...
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 06:52
|
|
|
In NSW you have a few different groups, so it depends on where in the state, but definitely not the Noongar. They're over on the West Coast's southern end, though a good whack of them wound up in our state when they were displaced. We're mostly Koori, Kurringai, and Murri 'group' lands. Personally, I live in Bundjalung country, which is one of the Murri supergrouping's tribes and which itself has subtribes and groupings. I'm guessing your game is down in Sydney or thereabouts, so you're more likely to be dealing with the Koori peoples.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 07:10
|
|
|
Yeah, it's set in Sydney. Largely decided because of the amount of rain that region gets.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 07:25
|
|
|
Axelgear posted:
Canberra is an artificial city built only for government where there's almost nothing to do for fun and the only past-time there really seems to be is drinking with colleagues, except instead of drinking bogan-style with mates you're drinking Japan-style where you have to pretend that Going Out With Colleages Is So Much Fun For Glorious Work Harmony and it crushes you as a human being. so Canberra as a Seer stronghold is perfect. edit: speaking of which, this probably means Japan is a Seer success story (or at least they claim it as one). bewilderment fucked around with this message at 09:30 on Feb 9, 2017 |
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 09:27
|
|
|
... Loomer, I don't mean to use you as a dictionary, but you wouldn't happen to know any of the occult history of New Zealand while you're at it? Or at least a place to start looking? Because this poo poo is gold, but on the wrong side of the Tasman for me.rumble in the bunghole posted:The Melbourne vs Sydney Test match (cricket) isn't ending. It's entering it's second week and some magical bullshit is afoot. Can the Mages save Australia from watching a lovely sport? As an inveterate cricket hater, this plotline speaks to me.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 12:53
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 10:40 |
|
|
Unfortunately, no, not a lot other than the OTO and Golden Dawn history there, with the attendant Masonic and theosophist bodies. The last temple of the true blue Golden Lawn lines was Whare Ra over your side. The Maori of course have an interesting esoteric culture of their own, and there's the recurringand probably fictional archaeological finds of giants. Leadbeaters rather grand theory of the next step in human development is meant to be shared between both countries, too. NZ is still, to my infinite displeasure as an Aussie, home to the most viable and lawful Golden Dawn lodge lineage anywhere. I haven't got a copy myself but Ellwoods Islands of the Dawn is a good place to start, along with any suitable resource on Maori magical practices and customs.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2017 13:12
|
|