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cptn_dr posted:Well I just finished reading Dave B's The Soul Cage, and holy poo poo, I have fallen in love with Mage all over again. Thank you to whoever it was that reminded me not to skip it, because it's given me entire new bars to aim for when running my Mage chronicle, and has really helped me grok the shape of a good Mage game. Me, a few days ago: "Haha, there is no way I am reading a 600+ page .pdf of an actual play transcript." Me, tonight: "Oh boy, I can't wait to read some more of this 600+ page .pdf of an actual play transcript!"
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Mar 21, 2017 00:10
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The Sin of Onan posted:
In fairness I do prefer that myth myself, because it has an element of pathos to it but it may also be Fate mangling my perception of how cool medusa is 
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Mar 21, 2017 00:42
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I know a couple of Hellenists and they can be very touchy about people taking Ovid as canonical - this myth in particular - so I tend to react before I think when it comes up. Or read properly, in this case.
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I would argue you can even run a Vampire game as 'mostly heroic' with a suitable group. It's going to occasionally go off the rails and involve grungy violence and be 90's as gently caress, but since vampires feed on literal violence and can choose who they feed on, it's easier to justify what they do in an action movie sort of way. It's still evil, but you could tell a story about five kickass vampires in trenchcoats murdering their way through the Mafia and I'm pretty sure like half this thread has played some variation of that game over the years. It's fun. Beasts pretty much have to torture people, either in petty or overt ways. Psychological abuse is a lot harder to justify and that's why it seems gross. Maybe this is because I'm an American and we love a good movie about shooting people in the head (as long as they're Nazis or whatever). I guess what I'm saying is that the moral benchmark for a CofD game should be, 'how would this particular monster fight Nazis?'
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Mar 21, 2017 00:53
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Mendrian posted:I would argue you can even run a Vampire game as 'mostly heroic' with a suitable group. It's going to occasionally go off the rails and involve grungy violence and be 90's as gently caress, but since vampires feed on literal violence and can choose who they feed on, it's easier to justify what they do in an action movie sort of way. It's still evil, but you could tell a story about five kickass vampires in trenchcoats murdering their way through the Mafia and I'm pretty sure like half this thread has played some variation of that game over the years. It's fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWmXBknC3K8
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Mar 21, 2017 00:55
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Loving the stock SFX of a bobcat in there, really when I think vampires I go straight to large cats
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Mar 21, 2017 01:29
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Yawgmoth posted:Loving the stock SFX of a bobcat in there, really when I think vampires I go straight to large cats Having seen the movie, it actually kind of works in context. The vampire's very cat-like, she spends half the film scampering across rooftops.
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Mar 21, 2017 01:30
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Mendrian posted:I would argue you can even run a Vampire game as 'mostly heroic' with a suitable group. It's going to occasionally go off the rails and involve grungy violence and be 90's as gently caress, but since vampires feed on literal violence and can choose who they feed on, it's easier to justify what they do in an action movie sort of way. It's still evil, but you could tell a story about five kickass vampires in trenchcoats murdering their way through the Mafia and I'm pretty sure like half this thread has played some variation of that game over the years. It's fun. You've found a pretty good moral benchmark for RPG characters in general.
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Mar 21, 2017 01:38
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Having seen the movie, it actually kind of works in context. The vampire's very cat-like, she spends half the film scampering across rooftops. Italian Spiderman remains the best use of stock bobcat noises in inappropriate settings.
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Mar 21, 2017 01:46
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A lot of the problems with Beast are problems in it's source material, it's just not as obvious when it's not in an RPG. A Girl Walks Home At Night, the Iranian vampire movie, got mentioned in this thread earlier. On one level it's about a woman with Agency in a place that denies it to her, but at the same time she's still a serial killer who leaves a trail of bodies. Nightbreed/Cabal is about accepting yourself as who you are and finding strength in it and forging a new community. But at the same time the Nightbreed eat people and maybe humanity would be better off setting them on fire after all. This doesn't really make Beast any better, but I do think it helps show where they were coming from and why it was a bad idea from the begining.
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Mar 21, 2017 03:40
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neaden posted:A lot of the problems with Beast are problems in it's source material, it's just not as obvious when it's not in an RPG. A Girl Walks Home At Night, the Iranian vampire movie, got mentioned in this thread earlier. On one level it's about a woman with Agency in a place that denies it to her, but at the same time she's still a serial killer who leaves a trail of bodies. Nightbreed/Cabal is about accepting yourself as who you are and finding strength in it and forging a new community. But at the same time the Nightbreed eat people and maybe humanity would be better off setting them on fire after all. This doesn't really make Beast any better, but I do think it helps show where they were coming from and why it was a bad idea from the begining. Yeah, A Girl Walks Home At Night got called out as having similar problems, where the "disenfranchised minority" level of the story is completely uncoupled from the "scary murderer" metaphor, like they aren't part of the same story.
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Mar 21, 2017 03:43
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True Blood suffered from that- they wanted to make vampirism a metaphor for homosexuality so badly but also wanted vampires to be psychopaths, and...
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Mar 21, 2017 03:47
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Pope Guilty posted:True Blood suffered from that- they wanted to make vampirism a metaphor for homosexuality so badly but also wanted vampires to be psychopaths, and... True Blood gets over it pretty quickly. The further they get from the novels (which are awful) the more it leans into "no, vampires really are just total psychopaths and any metaphor to minority civil rights is ridiculous."
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Mar 21, 2017 03:58
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Conquering Heroes starts out demonizing Heroes like it's going out of style, but each and every single one of it's examples is "No this is a profoundly broken person who was made that way by a Beast who was either ignorant of it's nature (but still dangerous) or actively malicious." And then most of the example Beasts are the pettiest assholes in existence.
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Mar 21, 2017 04:35
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Sexy snake did nothing wrong
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Mar 21, 2017 04:36
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Sneksy basically inherited everything he has (including the sinking of the Titanic) and has leveraged that into micromanaging the gently caress out of about 30 miles of Atlantic coastline.
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Mar 21, 2017 04:37
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Where does Null Snyper fit into all this?
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Mar 21, 2017 04:57
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Ideally somewhere well-ventilated and downwind.
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Mar 21, 2017 05:17
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The Air Quality Implications For The Location of Null Snyper On The White Wolf's Burden: An Essay
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Mar 21, 2017 05:38
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cptn_dr posted:Where does Null Snyper fit into all this? Null Snyper, and Insatiables in general, is the result of someone operating from the idea that since Heroes weren't a good enough villain, they needed to make "Evil Beasts". But since the party line is that Beasts Aren't Evil, they had to backweld a villain faction into the game inexpertly after the fact. They don't work well with the mechanics, as they steal 4 or five concepts that are otherwise exclusive options against each other, and even the things that they made up out of whole cloth reference rules and conditions that don't exist. It doesn't help that their exclusive terminology is stilted and dumb, or that their elemental themed powers are double edged swords except for the one that's utterly gamebreaking. Null Snyper could have easily been an Evil Beast, and likely would have worked better as one, because as it stands she ignores her splats one supposed drawback.
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Mar 21, 2017 07:43
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My most fervent hope is that CCP will be healthy enough after Hunter 2e comes out to give us another Collection of Horrors. Did it not sell well? Because "Mother of Monsters" is basically the ultimate elevator pitch you'd give to someone turned off of WoD by vampire politics or whatever. A perfect, horrific crisis that requires quick wits. Everything in the book is good to perfect.
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Mar 21, 2017 08:25
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Mors Rattus posted:Sexy snake did nothing wrong I stand by my claim that parts of this game would have made for an interesting minor splat in Exalted.  Just drop the badly written social justice and psychological abuse stuff and tell us the stories and troubles of playing monsters like a gigantic sexy snake monster in a world populated by gods and humanoid super-god ubermenschen that can rip you apart in a few seconds of glorious stunting. It's not like it'd be that out of place in that setting. Especially when compared to how out of place she is in the CofD. Edit: Did we ever figure out what the point of Sneksy was supposed to be? Like, what is he supposed to do as an antagonist? From what was posted his general locale and themes seemed to be so removed from any reasonable concept of play that it'd probably be an interesting tale to learn how a game even got to facing off with her. Archonex fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Mar 21, 2017 |
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Mar 21, 2017 13:06
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Basic Chunnel posted:My most fervent hope is that CCP will be healthy enough after Hunter 2e comes out to give us another Collection of Horrors. Did it not sell well? Because "Mother of Monsters" is basically the ultimate elevator pitch you'd give to someone turned off of WoD by vampire politics or whatever. A perfect, horrific crisis that requires quick wits. Everything in the book is good to perfect. ....uhhh?
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Mar 21, 2017 13:50
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I feel like I've missed something about beast with the revelation there's a sexy snake.
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Mar 21, 2017 14:01
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 Sexy Snake man there is an Incarnate because his Horror somehow sunk the titanic before his devouring, once he found this out he spontaneously incarnated. He's got presence 8 and ludicrous amounts of armor/defense but basically zero actual combat skills beyond raw strength. (No dots in brawl, weaponry, firearms, low dex, etc). As for what you're supposed to do with Sexy Snake? Basically the only way the plot hooks have to get him involved is if you somehow force the plot to go to the town where he's set up shop, or if you somehow come into possession of part of his collection. And I do mean "town", it's basically a fishing town that's popular in the summer for the beach, and he regularly kills people with storms to remind them to respect the water, but he's content with the way things are and fairly established in his Myth so he's got no reason to hurt the PCs except in service/defense of his Myth.
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Mar 21, 2017 14:12
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Kurieg posted:....uhhh? CCP, the company responsible for Eve Online, owned the White Wolf IP before they sold it to Paradox (and had a similar hands-off policy where they delegated the tabletop publishing to Onyx Path), so I imagine it's just a matter of not knowing that sale happened.
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Mar 21, 2017 14:26
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Cease to Hope posted:CCP, the company responsible for Eve Online, owned the White Wolf IP before they sold it to Paradox (and had a similar hands-off policy where they delegated the tabletop publishing to Onyx Path), so I imagine it's just a matter of not knowing that sale happened. Yeah, I was mostly just confused as to the how because that happened 2 years ago and there has been a substantial amount of news in the past few months regarding Paradox and new white wolf.
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Mar 21, 2017 14:54
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Nah I was just sedated and lost track of the alphabet soup. I meant OPP
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Mar 21, 2017 16:46
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Hey, I'm starting up a Mage game set in Denver. Do you have any sources/inspiration for occult Denver?
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Mar 21, 2017 16:48
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Kurieg posted:
Okay but what if we just sacrifice Buffy to him?
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Mar 21, 2017 16:49
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tokenbrownguy posted:Hey, I'm starting up a Mage game set in Denver. Do you have any sources/inspiration for occult Denver? The mustang statue is still there, still an incredible eyesore, and christened with the blood of its maker. It's basically the premise for Christine, if Christine were an ugly statue Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Mar 21, 2017 |
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Mar 21, 2017 17:04
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tokenbrownguy posted:Hey, I'm starting up a Mage game set in Denver. Do you have any sources/inspiration for occult Denver? Well, I mean, most of what I know about Detroit I learned from five minutes on wikipedia. I'm nobody's idea of a historian. That said, using the same method, apparently there was a leak at a nuclear waste site near Denver that contaminated a good chunk of the city, and in the spirit of Carnivale there's nothing I love more than tying nuclear secrets and tests to magic. It's the highest major city by altitude in the United States, and the Baby Boomer capital of America so obviously it's a Seers of the Throne stronghold. There's a statue of a blue horse that killed its creator when a chunk of the sculpture fell on him and cut his artery open, which is rumored to be cursed. It's one of the few cities not built near major lines of transportation / water, instead it was pretty much born from a gold rush.
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Mar 21, 2017 17:09
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Pope Guilty posted:Okay but what if we just sacrifice Buffy to him? He's an Incarnate, he's explicitly immune to Heroes.
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Mar 21, 2017 17:26
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Basic Chunnel posted:The most obvious thing that irl crackpots point to here is the construction of Denver International Airport - https://www.buzzfeed.com/rickysans/the-mysterious-conspiracy-theories-surrounding-the-denver-ai Here's a pretty definitive list of Denver Airport stories.
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Mar 21, 2017 17:29
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neaden posted:A lot of the problems with Beast are problems in it's source material, it's just not as obvious when it's not in an RPG. A Girl Walks Home At Night, the Iranian vampire movie, got mentioned in this thread earlier. On one level it's about a woman with Agency in a place that denies it to her, but at the same time she's still a serial killer who leaves a trail of bodies. Nightbreed/Cabal is about accepting yourself as who you are and finding strength in it and forging a new community. But at the same time the Nightbreed eat people and maybe humanity would be better off setting them on fire after all. This doesn't really make Beast any better, but I do think it helps show where they were coming from and why it was a bad idea from the begining. I think focus is very important here. You could make a story where the cannibalism and serial murder of your minority-analogue is divorced enough from the narrative about persecution and marginalization that it's very clear that you're not really saying that women and the LGBT are cannibal serial killers. If you were doing it with vampires, you'd want them to be emphatic people and downplay the predatory aspects of drinking blood. I don't really think that works with Beast, though, because Beast places an incredibly heavy emphasis on the horrible things Beasts do. Beasts are cosmologically defined as people who need to abuse, their X-splats are focused on how they abuse, the examples provided all have a lurid focus on the details of how Beasts hurt other people, and the examples of play involve engaging in brutality that is shown to make the other players uncomfortable.
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Mar 21, 2017 18:02
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The Unlife Aquatic posted:Now that I think about it Beast seems like something Taro Yoko would write. I'm not sure if this makes it better or worse. That's rather insulting to Taro Yoko, who is a much better writer than anyone behind the actual core conceits of Beast. Also, I think it's disingenuous to compare things like mages or werewolves to beasts. Yeah, the former can definitely be assholes and cause problems, the more power you have, the more capacity you have to be a monster with it, but they're by no means fundamentally tied to it as an inescapable character aspect, unlike with Beast. Although really the problem comes down to it ultimately not being the in game characters who are hypocrites, but the writing itself. You don't get the required sense of disconnect between the author and the text to say "it is this fictional character relaying this information who is messed up and not the actual person writing it".
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Mar 21, 2017 18:22
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The Sin of Onan posted:I feel like I should point out that that's only one version of the Medusa story, and a very late version at that, as it seems to have originated with the Roman poet Ovid. The oldest versions of the story, which predate Ovid by centuries, have Medusa and her sisters born as hideous monsters, children of the chthonic sea deities Phorkys and Keto - not human, and never human. Most people these days treat Ovid's version as if it's the canon one, and that distresses me a bit, since Ovid was basically setting out in the Metamorphoses to rewrite all of classical myth with a theme of transformation and change, and he inserted and possibly made up a hell of a lot of stuff sometimes to shoehorn some of the more famous stories (like Perseus and the Gorgons) into his desired mould. So what you're saying is that Ovid wrote his fetish into every major story at the time and got away with it (I kid, I kid, but it's a funny way to think of it).
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Mar 21, 2017 18:27
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Obligatum VII posted:So what you're saying is that Ovid wrote his fetish into every major story at the time and got away with it (I kid, I kid, but it's a funny way to think of it). Having read Ovid, but not the Metamorphosis, this probably isn't far from the truth. One of the funniest things I've ever experienced in my life was reading and discussing the Art of Love in a class that was 95% women.
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Mar 21, 2017 18:38
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I think the real key is consistency with your metaphors. In Buffy, slaying vampires is a metaphor for a lot of different things at different times, but it works out because none of the things it stands for actually conflict with each other, so whatever metaphor is useful this week can move to the front. (And conversely, one of the big complaints about Season 6 was that they made magic a metaphor for addiction, which wasn't consistent with how it had worked before and felt off.) The metaphors in Beast fail because they're completely in conflict with the text. The text says that Beasts are basically human garbage—sadistic, arrogant, and dedicated to causing suffering—and this doesn't mesh with the subtext that they're morally upright and wrongfully persecuted. The end result is that most readers decide that the book is lying to them.
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Mar 21, 2017 18:48
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I was just referring to the fact that he looks like the snake demon the satanic frat boys were sacrificing girls to in the episode "Reptile Boy".
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Mar 21, 2017 18:59
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Obligatum VII posted:That's rather insulting to Taro Yoko, who is a much better writer than anyone behind the actual core conceits of Beast. It was primarily intended as a joke, I'm a total Taro Yoko fangirl and I agree with you entirely.
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Mar 21, 2017 19:05
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