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Scrubbed, as in dragged the play marker around looking for a background image and header color that matched the screenshots. I didn't actually watch them.
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Feb 18, 2017 18:44
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Jesus, I didn't even connect the name Avery with the Monsterhearts designer because who the gently caress would actually do that? So it's not just a trans woman stereotype, it's specifically naming a loathsome monster after someone he doesn't like and mocking her by portraying her as an amoral sexual predator. I'm out. I'm sorry, OPP, you do good work and I'd like to support you, but if there's even a chance one penny of my money will go to paying the poo poo heads who backed that decision...I'm not comfortable with that.
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Feb 18, 2017 19:14
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Tiny Deer posted:I'm out. I'm sorry, OPP, you do good work and I'd like to support you, but if there's even a chance one penny of my money will go to paying the poo poo heads who backed that decision...I'm not comfortable with that. If you didn't spend money anywhere your money might tangentially benefit awful people, you wouldn't spend money anywhere. Blame the people who actually did the bad thing, not other people who probably aren't happy about it either.
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Feb 18, 2017 20:17
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ok where's the loving Zak S bomb I'm in a facebook argument with some people I respect who are, for some reason, defending him. they're saying he's kind of a prick but overall a Good Person on LGBT issues, race, etc and most definitely not an alt-right person or Nazi, which seems very loving at odds with what I've heard here and saw on that WoD appgame. one of them does not consider Ettin a reliable source because apparently Ettin's arranged harassment campaigns too? this is news to me and all I could find googling was Zak's girlfriend getting mad as hell that goons were clowning on her and Ettin was ignoring it. I don't follow this closely enough to actually have witnessed any of what Zak did, I've just occasionally caught whiffs of him being a loathsome piece of poo poo, so if people could point me towards his greatest (s)hits that would be good. WeedlordGoku69 fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Feb 18, 2017 |
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Feb 18, 2017 20:39
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:ok where's the loving Zak S bomb It's actually kind of difficult to find 'proof', mostly because Zak's defenders hide behind private messages and private discussion groups. I couldn't tell you, for instance, if it were organized. And somehow all discussion of Zak's various transgressions get mired in cyclones of 'no, it is you who are the harasser!' or, 'no, it is you who is hateful!' and on and on until everybody just gets tired and goes home. If anybody has anything useful, it would probably be appreciated, not only because it's important to educated threadgoers but as stuff to send on to WW.
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Feb 18, 2017 21:04
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:ok where's the loving Zak S bomb He's not a nazi, and it would be a stretch to describe him as alt-right. Really, he's "just" a shitlord serial harasser, but I think you'll have a tough time boxing him into any convenient labels along those lines. As for some links, they've been posted here and in other threads, but: http://ettinjiggywithit.tumblr.com/post/106855388993/that-time-zak-smith-ran-a-harassment-blog (From Ettin's blog, so I guess this one doesn't count) https://storify.com/AndriErlingsson/zak-s-runs-a-secret-harassment-group-online https://shawnstruck.blogspot.ca/2015/01/zak-s-roll-for-harassment_5.html http://failforward.co.uk/post/93348768153/how-dungeons-and-dragons-is-endorsing-the-darkest https://gomakemeasandwich.wordpress.com/2015/03/10/this-post-is-insufferably-long-and-im-sorry-for-that-longtw/ There are undoubtedly others, plus him recently getting caught red-handed impersonating Shannon Applecline on reddit. https://twitter.com/machineiv/status/832477423899783168
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Feb 18, 2017 21:09
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:ok where's the loving Zak S bomb Alien Rope Burn posted:If it need be said, I'd suggest keeping things civil and point them to articles about Mr. Sabbath's harassment. The Storify link is particularly damning.
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Feb 18, 2017 21:09
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Tiny Deer posted:I'm out. I'm sorry, OPP, you do good work and I'd like to support you, but if there's even a chance one penny of my money will go to paying the poo poo heads who backed that decision...I'm not comfortable with that. Onyx Path game lines and White Wolf: A spotter's guide. World of Darkness games, Chronicles of Darkness games, Exalted: Licensed from WW, books have to be approved by them. Scarred Lands: shared IP with Nocturnal. Nothing to do with White Wolf Cavaliers of Mars: owned by Rose Bailey, nowt to do with White Wolf Pugmire: owned by Pugsteady (Eddy's company), nowt to do with White Wolf Scion and Trinity: owned by Onyx Path. Definitely nothing to do with White Wolf. I don't know why forum threads are being deleted, but I'll ask. There's limits on what I can say on an open forum, but the prevailing mood among WoD and CofD Devs is not good right now.
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Feb 18, 2017 21:22
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:ok where's the loving Zak S bomb AFAIK he's not a Nazi or anything. Doesn't stop him from being poo poo. One of the issues is that there really is no Zak S bomb. I think that to "get it" you need to do one of two things. The first is to pay attention to circumstantial happenings, like him getting caught out sockpuppeting with a reddit account named SAppelcline* (after Shannon Appelcline, RPG history nerd and one of the people that runs RPG.net). Or the Dongion, which just happened to attack people that Zak didn't like, in Zak's writing style, using Zak's vocabulary. Or naming a lovely predatory trans woman character after a game designer he doesn't like. Or the fact that Mikan isn't on the internet anymore. None of those examples is a smoking gun, but I don't think that impersonating a RPGnet admin on reddit to promote your own games and push the narrative of you being an innocent victim of a smear campaign is the action of an actual innocent victim of a smear campaign. The other option is to believe people when they say they've been harassed, like the blogger wundergeek, or WoD writers David Hill and Filamena Young. Naturally, this is somewhat confused by the fact that Zak is perfectly willing to spread doubt by saying that he's the one being harassed, via friends and sockpuppets. There's also stuff like seebs's faux-evenhanded defenses, and the constant litany of "only facts matter", "where's the evidence?" etc, followed by minimizing or ignoring the evidence. * Of course, Zak claims that 1) the account wasn't pretending to be the real Appelcline, it was named that "as a joke", and 2) the account wasn't him, it was a friend of his.
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Feb 18, 2017 21:27
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quote:* Of course, Zak claims that 1) the account wasn't pretending to be the real Appelcline, it was named that "as a joke", and 2) the account wasn't him, it was a friend of his. And that friend was using his computer, which is why you need to unban my World of Warcraft account because it wasn't me who yelled all those slurs into trade chat.
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Feb 18, 2017 21:34
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Sinteres posted:If you didn't spend money anywhere your money might tangentially benefit awful people, you wouldn't spend money anywhere. Blame the people who actually did the bad thing, not other people who probably aren't happy about it either. I know there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, but this is one of those cases where I can opt to just not consume.
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Feb 18, 2017 21:40
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So I guess it's possible that I just got into an argument with Zak that lasted through late last night up till today on Steam's Vampire: Prelude forums. Some guy (with a hidden profile, as I later discovered. So I can't figure out the account's age or other actions. It's not made any posts prior however outside of the Shadowrun forums a month or two back.) was bouncing from thread to thread doing this "You have no proof!" schtick to anyone that argued that Zak was a horrible bastard. So I decided to start posting proof in the assumption that he was just misinformed. Then...Well, this exact same strategy of denial started happening: Emy posted:Naturally, this is somewhat confused by the fact that Zak is perfectly willing to spread doubt by saying that he's the one being harassed, via friends and sockpuppets. There's also stuff like seebs's faux-evenhanded defenses, and the constant litany of "only facts matter", "where's the evidence?" etc, followed by minimizing or ignoring the evidence. Right down to the "Where's the evidence!" thing only for a second account to chime in and say that David Hill is mentally ill and his claims can't be trusted. All while claiming that actually it was Zak that was the one being hit with death threats. So that's something. Either it's a really hardcore fan of his that employs the same strategies, it's an odd coincidence (Which is odd, since I just read that Zak was active on RPG.net with a sockpuppet account doing the exact same thing.), or it's him. I dropped the link to the google doc in response to his constant claims that there's no proof and Archonex fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Feb 19, 2017 |
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Feb 18, 2017 21:44
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Emy posted:One of the issues is that there really is no Zak S bomb. I think that to "get it" you need to do one of two things. The first is to pay attention to circumstantial happenings, like him getting caught out sockpuppeting with a reddit account named SAppelcline* (after Shannon Appelcline, RPG history nerd and one of the people that runs RPG.net). Or the Dongion, which just happened to attack people that Zak didn't like, in Zak's writing style, using Zak's vocabulary. Or naming a lovely predatory trans woman character after a game designer he doesn't like. Or the fact that Mikan isn't on the internet anymore. None of those examples is a smoking gun, but I don't think that impersonating a RPGnet admin on reddit to promote your own games and push the narrative of you being an innocent victim of a smear campaign is the action of an actual innocent victim of a smear campaign. The other option is to believe people when they say they've been harassed, like the blogger wundergeek, or WoD writers David Hill and Filamena Young. I think Ardent on RPG.net put it well: quote:It is quite the established pattern when it comes to harassment (especially, though not exclusively, against women and GLBT people) that witness reports - even scores and scores of them - are soundly ignored, and people demand evidence that would satisfy on any given episode of CSI. If we have already established (and we have) that Zak commits identity theft for his own benefit (not to mention sockpuppeting his own defenses), why are people granting him so much benefit of the doubt that it allows for completely ignoring the voices of everyone who has been subjected to his particular flavor of "disagreement" and "criticism"?
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Feb 18, 2017 21:47
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The threads about the subject on the OPP forums have been restored.
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Feb 18, 2017 21:54
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inklesspen posted:These are fully in character for Zak, so I don't have a hard time believing he wrote them. But I also haven't seen the Avery dialogue in any of the lets play videos I scrubbed through. So, uh, what's the provenance on these links? It's in Chapter "Los Angeles, Goin Back to Cali: I Killed and Ate Frankie's Chihuahua", a little bit after Case talks to Alfonso (who kills cops ("sometimes just because it's fun") and goes on a rant about how vampires are a metaphor for class and capitalism and how the "gods" hate LA, but love Hollywood) for the first time and shows him a Tremere rune he found.
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Feb 18, 2017 22:03
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LatwPIAT - they do it because they don't actually *want* proof. They want to look accountable while still tacitly ignoring what he's saying and doing because "he treats me OK, so he can't be bad!". Demanding ever greater amounts of proof is simply a way to pummel victims.
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Feb 18, 2017 22:07
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inklesspen posted:These are fully in character for Zak, so I don't have a hard time believing he wrote them. But I also haven't seen the Avery dialogue in any of the lets play videos I scrubbed through. So, uh, what's the provenance on these links? If you check his Twitter, he's also up there fully admitting to writing those parts, but they're not about Avery Adler, see, because he based that character on his friend Bailey Jay with her consent, which is why the ugly predatory, hypersexualized transwoman stereotype is named "Avery". 
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Feb 18, 2017 22:10
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LatwPIAT posted:If you check his Twitter, he's also up there fully admitting to writing those parts, but they're not about Avery Adler, see, because he based that character on his friend Bailey Jay with her consent, which is why the ugly predatory, hypersexualized transwoman stereotype is named "Avery". Sigh.
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Feb 18, 2017 22:25
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Dave Brookshaw posted:Onyx Path game lines and White Wolf: A spotter's guide. Thank you, Dave. You're a decent guy and I'm sorry you and the other actual decent people at OPP are dealing with this. It doesn't change my feelings about WW's IP though unfortunately, and that's kind of where my interests are. I haven't even looked at the other game lines and honestly even the association is supremely unpleasant for me to think about.
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Feb 18, 2017 22:32
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:ok where's the loving Zak S bomb Tweet something negative about him and see how long the unsolicited password reset notifications and attempted logons take.
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Feb 18, 2017 22:41
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Is Deviant a WW thing via CoD licensing?
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Feb 19, 2017 00:13
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Basic Chunnel posted:Is Deviant a WW thing via CoD licensing? It'll still fall under the Chronicles of Darkness brand (any claims to the contrary or attempts to make it not so would probably be a bit too wink-wink nudge-nudge) so it will be.
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Feb 19, 2017 00:21
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Basic Chunnel posted:Is Deviant a WW thing via CoD licensing? Yes.
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Feb 19, 2017 00:37
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Little status update: It looks like David Hill is posting on OPP's forums.http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/general/off-topic/1050412-white-wolf-hires-zak-smith-im-out/page4 posted:This is probably stupid. But whatever. Jesus gently caress, Zak's an utter rear end in a top hat. That's worse than what I figured. Archonex fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Feb 19, 2017 |
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Feb 19, 2017 02:22
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nevermind, solved the mystery
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Feb 19, 2017 02:32
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Babylon Astronaut posted:I don't want to dox the dude or anything, but what does David Hill do as far as RPGs are concerned? Does he have goods or services I can buy? He writes for OPP.
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Feb 19, 2017 02:33
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He writes. He has been involved in pretty much all the nWoD 2e core materials.
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Feb 19, 2017 02:34
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Archonex posted:There's a tiny blurb in one of the books describing one of their products. It's a tiny red pill derived from vampire blood. They have a contract with the military that lets them use it as a combat stimulant for soldiers. Note that the soldiers are completely oblivious to the fact that they're taking an explicitly life destroying substance that could probably drive them into a frenzy and literally bring them kicking and screaming back from the grave as a Draugr or vampire if they OD'd on it or died. On the plus side, if they do? Well, that's more material to make more pills! I mean, it's still probably less addictive than the crank and meth they were handing out to the soldiers before.
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Feb 19, 2017 02:35
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Mors Rattus posted:He writes. He has been involved in pretty much all the nWoD 2e core materials.
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Feb 19, 2017 02:38
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Well poo poo, I made an account to express my support in that thread and a mod has to approve it. Plus I accidentally answered the security question using proper capitals before realizing that you were supposed to do it in lower case. Guess I just hosed that one up. citybeatnik posted:I mean, it's still probably less addictive than the crank and meth they were handing out to the soldiers before. I don't know, man. Getting resurrected as a larvae or draugr sounds like it'd be an even shittier deal. You don't even get to enjoy the privileges of immortality in that case. Archonex fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Feb 19, 2017 |
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Feb 19, 2017 02:42
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Babylon Astronaut posted:Well that's a sticky wicket. Not really. Yeah, CoD buys send money to WW because of their deals but it is also directly showing them what works. If CoD does better the WW stuff then I would like to hope that tells them what people do and don't want.
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Feb 19, 2017 02:46
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Babylon Astronaut posted:Well that's a sticky wicket. He's written a few things out of his association with White Wolf and Onyx Path too, including Apotheosis Drive X and Maschine Zeit under Machine Age Productions, which I think was his personal label or shared with his wife or so. I believe he was part of the team for MWP's Leverage roleplaying game, too?
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Feb 19, 2017 02:47
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Archonex posted:I don't know, man. Getting resurrected as a larvae or draugr sounds like it'd be an even shittier deal. You don't even get to enjoy the privileges of immortality in that case. It was more a commentary/agreement that tCG is Pentex if ported in to the nWoD and actually run by people focused on making a profit as opposed to being Captain Planet villains. The vitae pill/meth comparison is exactly the sort of thing that WW would use as a comparison to what actually goes on but turned to 11.
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Feb 19, 2017 02:50
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citybeatnik posted:It was more a commentary/agreement that tCG is Pentex if ported in to the nWoD and actually run by people focused on making a profit as opposed to being Captain Planet villains. The vitae pill/meth comparison is exactly the sort of thing that WW would use as a comparison to what actually goes on but turned to 11. Ah, true enough. Mind, I do think that if the old theory that the board of directors are extradimensional entities that literally want to invade the earth and enslave humanity is true then they literally are the same as Pentex insofar as being Captain Planet villains. The mutations on the alternate earth those hunters in that one story got sucked into were really hosed up. Horrific brass structures were everywhere, seemingly appearing out of the ground. And people that perked up and noticed the inherent wrongness of the place were transformed into...Something else by the things lording it up from overhead. From what I very vaguely recall from the text they were turned into basically catatonic things that were set out as an example to everyone else as to what happens when you step out of line. If that's the case they just are smarter than Pentex's saturday morning cartoon antics and cover up their real intent with a veneer of being profit motivated. But then, the NWoD/CoD is toolkit enough you can opt out of that explanation if you want. Archonex fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Feb 19, 2017 |
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Feb 19, 2017 02:52
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What book is that dimension surfing hunter story from?
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Feb 19, 2017 03:05
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Further Reading posted:What book is that dimension surfing hunter story from? It's one of the Hunter books. I'd have to check page through my books again. Give me a bit and i'll be able to tell you. I will say that I remember it being the one with a bunch of random fluff stories in it. Edit: Ah, found it! It's the Horror Recognition Guide. The details are spread out all over the book but it actually has a chapter primarily dedicated to it named "Ten Photographs". The photographs of which are pictures of this other world that Cheiron is heavily implied to be really obsessed with getting their hands on and covering up for some reason. Let me see if I can post the easiest one to find in the book, along with a quote. Give me a bit. Archonex fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Feb 19, 2017 |
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Feb 19, 2017 03:06
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Horror Recognition Guide
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Feb 19, 2017 03:08
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Archonex posted:It's one of the Hunter books. I'd have to check page through my books again. Give me a bit and i'll be able to tell you. I will say that I remember it being the one with a bunch of random fluff stories in it. I thought the implication there was less that they were evil entities trying to invade and take over the planet and more that they were amoral entities trying to keep what happened on THEIR planet from happening on ours by any means necessary. And making a buck.
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Feb 19, 2017 03:17
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As mentioned, here it is. I'll leave the majority of the chapter out to encourage people to pick it up. It really is a good book and covers all sorts of different game lines from a human or hunter perspective. Most of it is stuff like slashers, vampires, and other low to normal tier threats. Then you get to this chapter, which opens up with one of the ten photographs that makes it clear that you're getting into some real end-game level threats right off the bat. That's a building, if you can't tell. Or it was a building. Maybe it's still a building. But it's growing eyes. And there's weird chains savaging it like it's a Cenobite out of Hellraiser or something. quote:The surrounding details of the landscape are familiar enough: it’s 6th and Chestnut; the central point of reference is not the Liberty Bell, though, but a narrow, impossibly tall ziggurat of black basalt. Each level, in the scale of the figures standing in front of it, is some 10 feet high and sheer and polished, and each step is a good five feet beneath. One of the next pictures basically shows how humanity has been mutated or devolved into some sort of...Well, the quote explains it better. It's pretty  in it's implications. No picture this time since I don't want to basically make this  .quote:This is Fishtown, Greater Kensington. East Berks Street, in fact. I know it really well. But not like this. My dad still lives there. You can see the sign. Under a pale, right sky and a blazing sun whose rays appear to reach down and scorch the earth and everything in it. The buildings are the same, but they are scorched and bleached; the trees on the avenue are white, skeletal. A small crowd of people walk down the road toward the viewer. They wear ordinary clothes, but the clothes are ragged and faded, hang in a slightly off fashion, and in places have stains from viscous fluids that are so thick, so noxious, you can almost smell them: vomit, or sewage, or some other thing even more revolting. None of them have shoes. Their faces, like their feet, are covered with sores and sunburn that surround milky-white eyes, under hair scorched white and thin. Their hands, balled into fists, barely have any flesh at all, and what there is is red raw. One of them is speaking to the viewer. Or maybe screaming. The picture descriptions and ongoing story are interspersed with a number of Cheiron field reports tracking the hunter cell that basically say they really want these pictures back right the goddamn gently caress now. With a subtle implication that if they do come to the attention of any of the major hunter groups they'd be "implicated". The board of directors for Cheiron itself are apparently freaking out about it and taking a personal interest in the situation too. And given what we know about them it's not hard to connect the dots to understand why they'd be panicking. Their cover is dangerously close to getting blown, no matter which way you lean on their intentions. One of the Cheiron reports posted:The importance and delicacy of this operation cannot be exaggerated; the retrieval of the packet without any further leaks of its contents and without the implication of the Company absolutely must be accomplished. The Board of Directors consider this operation absolutely vital to the Company. Then there's this next quote. Which combined with the rest of the chapter (Which, again, i've left out. This is the tame stuff. In particular this next quote from the field reports comes after a somewhat NWS picture that shows them "processing" an extremely large number of humans en-masse into what are almost assuredly monsters of some sort. And the methods used are a lot more blatantly industrial in scale, eldritch, and monstrous than what Cheiron is currently publicly fielding in its operatives.) is both really ominous and pretty much outright states that the Cheiron Group's management are evil monsters of the highest order that want to do their own personal rendition of the Prince of a 100,000 Leaves on reality before it or anything else can get to it. Another Cheiron field report posted:The importance of anonymity for the Board of Directors is paramount, for without true anonymity, we will never be able to bring the Primary Development Plan to fruition. The integrity of the Group’s most central operations in the US is suspect if evidence leaks. Then a few hunters get sucked in as the story progresses and...Well, poo poo happens. Very bad poo poo. Things start to go increasingly lovecraftian in a very rapid and disturbing way. It's implied that one of them may get kidnapped and turned into this catatonic vegetable of a massive monster that...Well, just look at this: quote:Daylight again. A sign in the foreground reveals this to be 62nd and Wood-something — 62nd and Woodbine, perhaps? If it is, you can’t see any of the buildings from the north side. It’s this empty, rocky waste. But filling a large part of it are these three things. Two of them are in the background; the third is in the foreground, and you can only see its front parts. It’s this mound of wrinkled, naked pink flesh, presumably the shape of a particularly fat sausage; its front end tapers to some kind of more wrinkled, trunk like arrangement, ending in a toothless, sucking mouth. It has these short caterpillar legs and just above them, arranged in a kind of skirt, teats of some kind, which leak a pale liquid. Three people, two men and a woman, in those same ordinary but ragged street clothes, can be seen kneeling on the ground at the creature’s side. They stretch their necks up and suckle from some of the huge thing’s teats.  The hunters in question are not an end game tier, conspiracy backed group. They're basically tier 1 newbies. So you can guess how it eventually ends. I'll leave the rest out to encourage people to pick it up. Though it makes it very clear that it's quite possible that what Cheiron's management thinks is improving humanity is definitely not in humanity's best interests. Their end game is basically a hellish nightmare straight out of a lovecraftian dystopia. citybeatnik posted:I thought the implication there was less that they were evil entities trying to invade and take over the planet and more that they were amoral entities trying to keep what happened on THEIR planet from happening on ours by any means necessary. And making a buck. Like a lot of stuff in the NWoD/CoD it leaves it up for you to choose which is canon. However to my knowledge that story is the only one of the possibles truths regarding Cheiron that's gotten expanded on in fiction. So it's probably the most canon of the possibilities. But yeah, pick the thing up. It's pretty awesome if you're like me and want more fiction about the setting. Edit: Also, so no one thinks i'm bullshitting them here's a quote talking about the NDA thing I mentioned before that basically puts Cheiron on par with Wolfram and Hart from Angel: quote:Cheiron NDAs extend beyond death. DK hadn’t read the small print. And look what happened to him. Archonex fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Feb 19, 2017 |
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Feb 19, 2017 03:19
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So, has OPP voiced an "official" take on this to any degree? I'm guessing not, since presumably they have to tread carefully with the licenses and whatnot. Still, I can't imagine it sitting well with most of their crew.
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Feb 19, 2017 03:27
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