|
mods please change my name to egg dick insect man
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 14:02
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 2, 2024 18:01 |
|
|
Kurieg posted:IIRC egg dick insect man is a character that particular author re-used from a Lovecraft book that never actually happened. Just with the progenitor replaced for whatever old one it worshipped. Wait, really? What book is that? I know it's been mentioned rarely in other threads, but holy poo poo Lovecraft was one hosed up individual. Between his stories sometimes using the fear of racial miscegenation as proxy for the fears of associating with an "unknowable" other, his flat out bigotry that even extended towards his wife, and the dick bug man i'm starting to think he would have fit in just fine on 4chan or Reddit.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 14:21
|
|
|
Archonex posted:Wait, really? What book is that? Gonna bet he means that the person who wrote that chapter wrote a story for an ELDER GODS AND STRANGE BEASTIES book and then just reused the dude and not HP himself given that Lovecraft was a fuckin volcel lunatic
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 14:25
|
|
|
Archonex posted:I know it's been mentioned rarely in other threads, but holy poo poo Lovecraft was one hosed up individual. Between his stories sometimes using the fear of racial miscegenation as proxy for the fears of associating with an "unknowable" other, his flat out bigotry that even extended towards his wife, and the dick bug man i'm starting to think he would have fit in just fine on 4chan or Reddit. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 14:30
|
|
|
BENGHAZI 2 posted:Gonna bet he means that the person who wrote that chapter wrote a story for an ELDER GODS AND STRANGE BEASTIES book and then just reused the dude and not HP himself given that Lovecraft was a fuckin volcel lunatic Ah, gotcha. I've read a fair bit of Lovecraft's work, so that was surprising to me. Lovecraft was one stunningly messed up individual but I didn't think he was that far down the rabbit hole. Some fun facts about Lovecraft: Supposedly his wife had to periodically remind him to stop ranting about Jewish people in front of her because she was Jewish. On top of that he basically lived off her dime towards the end of their marriage. She eventually left him. Or, well. She tried too. Lovecraft assured her that the divorce was finalized, but he never did his part to finalize it. That meant that according to the state she was unknowingly living in a bigamous marriage when she remarried because of him. quote:After their marriage in St. Paul's Chapel in Manhattan on 3 March 1924 (Greene was then aged 40 and Lovecraft 33), Greene and Lovecraft relocated to Brooklyn and moved into her apartment. Soon the couple were facing financial difficulties. Greene lost her hat shop and suffered poor health. Lovecraft could not find work to support them both, so his wife moved to Cleveland for employment. Lovecraft lived by himself in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn and came to dislike New York life intensely.[11] He was basically the equivalent of a modern day basement dweller and probably would have fit in well with modern movements like the alt-right and whatever horrible poo poo some bad sub-reddits get up too nowadays. And yet all that being said I can say with confidence that he's not as messed up as the guy who came up with a character that spews eggs out of his dick with every hip thrust and infects others to do the same in some insane attempt to summon up the Old Ones. Archonex fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Mar 27, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 14:29
|
|
|
Lovecraft wouldn't have written anything like that because sex never comes up in his works and he was pretty juvenile in his depiction of sex and gender. This is pretty common in weird fiction, the most notable example is in Howard's works. There's a segment of people who believe Lovecraft was a closeted homosexual and that's why he didn't dwell on it. People often use his relationships with fans like Robert Barlow, at that time underage, as proof. There's no proof they had anything more than an awkward relationship though since it was likely that Barlow never told him his age, asked him to come visit, and then when Lovecraft came he was nice to the kid. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Mar 27, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 15:53
|
|
|
BENGHAZI 2 posted:Gonna bet he means that the person who wrote that chapter wrote a story for an ELDER GODS AND STRANGE BEASTIES book and then just reused the dude and not HP himself given that Lovecraft was a fuckin volcel lunatic It's a secondhand story, but yeah. basically the author of that section was tasked to work on some Lovecraft RPG, it never materialized, but he still had all this character copy written down and decided to use it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 16:59
|
|
|
The Sin of Onan posted:The church in second-century Rome was heavily Greek-speaking and largely focussed on immigrants. I love reading about Roman history and stuff like this. Do you have any books you can suggest? About actual history, not spooky vampire Rome history. I already read Requiem for Rome and loved it, I think it's one of the few WoD books I've held onto.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 18:13
|
|
|
Magechat: I'm still prepping that Denver Mage game. Just finishing up a re-read of the Tome of Mysteries and all that jazz. I've some questions about how GMs handle Wisdom I get the sliding bars = an easy way for players to conceptualize the decent into Madness. However, in practice Wisdom seems to punish mages for doing cool things (like defending themselves against other mages), and there doesn't really seem to be much benefit other than avoiding derangements and the +1/-1 to chatting with spirits? If you've run Mage, how do/did you make the mechanical side of Wisdom compelling for players?
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 22:31
|
|
|
tokenbrownguy posted:in practice Wisdom seems to punish mages for doing cool things you understand the concept of Wisdom perfectly
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 22:33
|
|
|
Mage Wisdom is like business ethics courses, where it's easy to know the technically correct answer to a situation (pick whatever's the most boring and risk-averse) but the actual option everyone chooses is the one they wanted to / planned on doing.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 22:37
|
|
|
tokenbrownguy posted:Magechat: Don't actually use any of the listed unique-to-mages 1E Wisdom sins, just use the Morality sins instead.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 22:41
|
|
|
crime fighting hog posted:I love reading about Roman history and stuff like this. Do you have any books you can suggest? Well, the Middle Empire is not exactly my period (I am a Late Antiquity scholar for the most part; ask me about the thesis I'm writing!), but Michael Kulikowski recently put out a book called Imperial Triumph: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine (also known as The Triumph of Empire: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine - I'm pretty sure they're two editions of the same book, but they have separate listings on Amazon, so I'm not certain), which is both pretty accessible and very detailed, so if this particular period is your thing, then I'd thoroughly recommend that. I've also heard good things about Mary Beard's SPQR, another recent publication, although I've not yet read it myself - I gather it's more about people's daily lives in the Early and Middle Empire periods than the political stuff, but that's also a fascinating subject. For my own period, the book that got me interested in Late Antiquity in the first place was James J O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire: The Emperor Who Brought It Down, the Barbarians Who Could Have Saved It. It's largely about two figures, Theodoric, king of the Gothic kingdom of Italy in the sixth century, and Justinian, the famous Eastern Roman Emperor. Theodoric is basically presented as a model Roman ruler, and in many ways he was: for all that he has a weird name and considers himself something called a "Goth", he's clearly well-acquainted with Greek and Roman literature; he sponsors rebuilding programmes for the monuments of Rome that had collapsed in the general slump of the Late Empire; he revives the grain dole for the city of Rome; he compiles Roman law; he sponsors classical Greco-Roman education and pays for teachers of rhetoric, mathematics, law, and other key subjects in the Greco-Roman curriculum out of the public purse in cities across Italy; he patronises the Nicene/Roman church, even though he is himself an Arian; and he effectively rules like an emperor in the old model. In fact, some of his Italo-Roman subjects are so glowing in their praise for him that they go so far as to actually call him "emperor," even though he himself never claims more than the title of "king" and "regent of Italy" (he's nominally the subject of the emperor in the East, but in reality Ostrogothic Italy is an independent kingdom). He is a strikingly Roman figure for someone who is generally assessed as a "barbarian," and O'Donnell does a pretty good job at portraying his reign as a period of stability and peace in Italy after the chaos and ineptitude of Late Roman rule. This is then ruined some years after Theodoric's death by the Eastern Roman invasion of the peninsula under Justinian, which brings chaos, destroys cities, depopulates Rome itself and kills most of the senators, precipitates an economic collapse, and then the Romans invite the Lombards into the peninsula to help them fight a very determined Gothic resistance in northern Italy, resulting in the Lombards carving off huge chunks of the peninsula for themselves and ending hundreds of years of Italian unity. The Dark Ages start here, in the sudden collapse of Italian prosperity, the wiping out of secular/classical education (Justinian is also shown as a religious fanatic who, among other things, suspects classical Greco-Roman education to be pagan, and tries to stamp it out as much as he can; see his closure of Plato's Academy in Athens), and the deaths of most of its writers in the classical model with the near-complete destruction of the Senate. Italy after the invasion is a burned-out and war-torn shadow of its former glory. The Ruin of the Roman Empire does a great job at reassessing Justinian and the actual effects of his western wars on both the western provinces and the eastern empire; the Empire is left perilously in debt and depleted of soldiers, paving the way for the subsequent collapses of the seventh century, and the "reconquered" provinces of Italy and Africa, previously under the competent and highly Roman management of the Goths and Vandals, are in ruins and half-occupied by Lombards and Berbers respectively. O'Donnell basically lays the blame for the retreat of literacy and Roman culture in the West squarely on the shoulders of Justinian, who tried to rebuild a Rome that did not need rebuilding according to his own model of what Rome should be (which was never what it was), and in doing so destroyed the Roman order and civilisation that Theodoric et al. had worked so hard to defend and nurture. Italy and Africa were the heart of secular intellectualism and classical culture in the Late Antique West - they were the only places with real cities and surviving classical education after the Western Roman collapse - and by destroying them, Justinian ripped out the heart of secular education and the intellectual traditions of the Roman Empire in the West. From that point on, the only real source of education was the church, and so education retreated from the middle class. It is at this point that the written record in Italy starts to diminish greatly, for instance, and aside from Cassiodorus, the former praetorian prefect (essentially prime minister) to Theodoric, who writes his memoirs in post-invasion Italy, the only writers we have left from the peninsula are churchmen; classical poets, historians, and philosophers are all gone from Italy. Africa is arguably even worse off, but that's outside the scope of The Ruin of the Roman Empire (and completely in the scope of my thesis, if you're interested!), which focusses mostly on Italy. Sorry, I know that was a bit of a ramble, but that book was very influential on me  Late Antiquity is often seen as a period of Romans/civilisation versus barbarians, but if you look closely, the emperors are remarkably cavalier about the civilisation they're theoretically defending (and they tend to spend more of their resources fighting each other than the supposed invaders), and it's actually the "barbarians" like Theodoric and Thrasamund who are doing most of the legwork in trying to save it.e: All the actual history in that last post is true as I understand it, but the spooky vampire Rome history was basically just me making poo poo up about vampires based on what I know of the second-century church in Rome. AFAIK, none of that material is canon to Requiem for Rome, although if any CoD writers are reading this, you are welcome to steal as much of it as you like. The Sin of Onan fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Mar 27, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 22:45
|
|
|
The more I read about Justinian the more he sounds almost arrogant enough to be a mage, honestly. Thank you for that informative post Omen! 
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 23:17
|
|
|
Had a weird moment of "if killing another Mage is a super special particularly evil sin over regular murder then what exactly do I do as adamantine arrow?" a few weeks back.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 23:22
|
|
|
To be fair, it's probably Guardians who kill the most mages. Arrows put in plenty of hours slaying manticores, collapsing buildings onto entire swat teams, etc.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 23:24
|
|
|
tokenbrownguy posted:in practice Wisdom seems to punish mages for doing cool things tokenbrownguy posted:If you've run Mage, how do/did you make the mechanical side of Wisdom compelling for players?
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 23:26
|
|
|
Yawgmoth posted:In all the mage games I've been in, the answer has been "we didn't". We just flatly ignored it because "here is a stat that fucks you up every time you have fun" is the stupidest loving thing to have in a game. Yeah, for all the good things Mage does this is the place where it really stumbles. Consequences should arise more naturally than Wisdom allows. I generally also ignore Wisdom, but if players do something really out there I will have it affect the narrative.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 23:31
|
|
|
The Unlife Aquatic posted:Yeah, for all the good things Mage does this is the place where it really stumbles. Consequences should arise more naturally than Wisdom allows. I generally also ignore Wisdom, but if players do something really out there I will have it affect the narrative. I just use wisdom as a barometer and flat out ignore the standard "sins". I did it in 1e and I'm doing it with 2e Awakening. If they do something heinous and/or something against their general disposition (I start with their virtue/vice and tie in obsessions as well). Consequences of losing wisdom are in character story only, and it's not something that I see as particularly harming to the character necessarily. NPCs may start to change their opinion of the mage +/- as well depending on what it was. All these things have much less to do with Wisdom, and more to do with story. I suppose there's nothing wrong about using it more strictly, as it does work its way into Paradox. I don't see a pressing need to do so unless one of the mages starts to go off the deep end.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 00:55
|
|
|
I always thought that high Wisdom was less a matter of not using magic and more, you know, not using it needlessly. My Mastigos Banker is fine with using it to give him an edge on business deals and/or going loud with psychic domination if push comes to shove but he's still going to get up and walk over to turn off the light switch as opposed to floating to it or warping space to bring it within reach. That sort of thing.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 01:07
|
|
|
Der Waffle Mous posted:Had a weird moment of "if killing another Mage is a super special particularly evil sin over regular murder then what exactly do I do as adamantine arrow?" a few weeks back. Litigate.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 01:44
|
|
|
Does Wizard Jail even exist? I'm hard pressed to think of how you get rid of a sufficiently awful Seer without straight-up murdering them.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 02:42
|
|
|
blastron posted:Does Wizard Jail even exist? I'm hard pressed to think of how you get rid of a sufficiently awful Seer without straight-up murdering them. High level Space magic and constant guard by Prime masters?
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 02:57
|
|
|
Earth is Wizard jail, man.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 02:58
|
|
|
LordAbaddon posted:High level Space magic and constant guard by Prime masters? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-klQ-kpq98
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 03:02
|
|
|
blastron posted:Does Wizard Jail even exist? I'm hard pressed to think of how you get rid of a sufficiently awful Seer without straight-up murdering them. Let me tell you about Oubliette...
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 03:11
|
|
|
Drop a dime to VASCU B)
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 03:20
|
|
|
blastron posted:Does Wizard Jail even exist?  I believe it's called the Lie.blastron posted:I'm hard pressed to think of how you get rid of a sufficiently awful Seer without straight-up murdering them. ... Oh, this is a different question than I thought.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 03:29
|
|
|
citybeatnik posted:I always thought that high Wisdom was less a matter of not using magic and more, you know, not using it needlessly. My Mastigos Banker is fine with using it to give him an edge on business deals and/or going loud with psychic domination if push comes to shove but he's still going to get up and walk over to turn off the light switch as opposed to floating to it or warping space to bring it within reach. That sort of thing. I always figured Wisdom existed to itself be a point of contention in magical society. The Guardians view paradox as the actual price of sin against Wisdom, as though it was a deeper morality to magic. The Silver Ladder, on the other hand, tends to view Wisdom as a limitation levied on the Fallen World to try and prevent Mages from reaching further and obtaining their birthrights. The other Orders just seem to accept it as whatever their individual members want to believe, with the Mysterium more concerned with Disbelief, the Arrow more concerned with finding personal challenge, and the Free Council doing whatever it is their many caucuses have decided to individually do that particular day. If you just view Wisdom as that thing that keeps you from doing cool stuff, well, part of it exists more to make that cool stuff have consequences. I'm not a fan of it as-implemented, but a more personalized system would rob it of the weight of theosophism.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 03:30
|
|
|
The Unlife Aquatic posted:The more I read about Justinian the more he sounds almost arrogant enough to be a mage, honestly. Welcome One of the things I disliked about Sothis Ascends was the way in which it kind of glossed over the actual effects of Justinian's conquests on the lands he conquered. You could almost get the impression based on it that everything was just fine in Italy, where in fact Rome had been virtually depopulated by Eastern Roman soldiers, half the cities were in ruins, there was a massive crisis over land caused by Justinian's declaration that all land transactions that took place after 493 (the year Theodoric and the Ostrogoths entered Italy, i.e. before most people alive in 561 had even been born) were to be reversed, the economy had collapsed utterly, plague had ravaged the peninsula and the armed forces (in fairness, that was hardly Justinian's fault, but it exacerbated the social and economic crisis that was going on in Italy), and another decision by Justinian to put all Arian churches under Nicene control was causing crisis in the army, as a significant number of Roman soldiers were Arians. Also, Justinian had just invited the Lombards into Pannonia (basically eastern Austria, western Hungary, Slovenia, and parts of Croatia and Serbia) to help him fight the Gepids, a decision which had left the Lombards a) with a very strong hand due to all the money he had given them, and b) on the doorstep of Italy, still a richer province than the wilderness of Pannonia despite its troubles, and now virtually undefended. The result was perhaps inevitable.As for Africa, the final words of the official Justinianic historian Procopius' Vandalic Wars - and bear in mind that this was not The Secret History, a private work Procopius wrote in which he literally accused Justinian and his wife Theodora of being devils in human form, but a public work that was meant as a hagiography/propaganda piece for Justinian - should suffice: "Thus it came to pass that those Libyans* who survived, few as they were and exceedingly poor, at last and after great toil found some peace." As the ending lines of a meant-to-be triumphal piece of propaganda, they're not exactly inspiring. Again, none of this is really mentioned in Sothis Ascends, which gives an impression that Justinian was actually a competent ruler. This is an assessment which I would stridently disagree with. * "Libyans" is Procopius' term for Romano-Africans. Anyway. I hadn't thought of Justinian as a mage, but it fits. Either a really crafty Praetorian (he certainly did succeed in destroying the prosperity of, and spreading violence and misery throughout, both the Western and Eastern halves of the Roman dominion, so well done Justinian) or an idealistic (but tragically unintelligent) Thearch. Ordinarily I'm very resistant to that kind of speculation about historical figures - it cheapens them too much - but this is a forum discussion, not an actual game of Mage. Mind you, the Dark Eras Companion has the post-Stalin Soviet Union being a massive piece of God-Machine Infrastructure, so maybe that's the direction Chronicles of Darkness is moving in these days. Not sure I'm entirely comfortable with that, but as someone who still quietly waves a flag for Alexander the Great being a mage, I'm not sure I'm in a position to throw stones. The Sin of Onan fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Mar 28, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 03:30
|
|
|
Thank you for your detailed reply to my question! I know a decent amount about Roman history, but not much about early church history in particular, and your write-up had all sorts of potential plot hooks for the Lancea et Sanctum in that era.The Sin of Onan posted:Well, the Middle Empire is not exactly my period (I am a Late Antiquity scholar for the most part; ask me about the thesis I'm writing!), but Michael Kulikowski recently put out a book called Imperial Triumph: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine (also known as The Triumph of Empire: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine - I'm pretty sure they're two editions of the same book, but they have separate listings on Amazon, so I'm not certain), which is both pretty accessible and very detailed, so if this particular period is your thing, then I'd thoroughly recommend that. I've also heard good things about Mary Beard's SPQR, another recent publication, although I've not yet read it myself - I gather it's more about people's daily lives in the Early and Middle Empire periods than the political stuff, but that's also a fascinating subject. I've read SPQR and it's really good-- it does focus mostly on daily lives, but it touches on politics a lot, too. It goes from the Republican era to the reign of Caracalla, but probably it devotes the most attention to the Late Republic and the Early Empire.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 03:43
|
|
|
I feel the same about using historical people like that. I'd love to see your thesis! I only study history for my own pleasure, but I can usually find my way through academic papers on it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 03:44
|
|
|
Der Waffle Mous posted:Had a weird moment of "if killing another Mage is a super special particularly evil sin over regular murder then what exactly do I do as adamantine arrow?" a few weeks back. Strip the ability to access the Supernal from them then murder them. Easy peasy.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 04:01
|
|
|
blastron posted:Does Wizard Jail even exist? I'm hard pressed to think of how you get rid of a sufficiently awful Seer without straight-up murdering them. Hm, you could put some kind of lethal spell on them with the trigger "if they use magic" on them? I think if they aren't a prisoner other Seers could just remove it, though.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 04:05
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:Hm, you could put some kind of lethal spell on them with the trigger "if they use magic" on them? I think if they aren't a prisoner other Seers could just remove it, though. It's pretty much impossible to imprison a mage. Human Jail doesn't really work out, since the second people look away they can blink through the bars or mind-control the guards or melt through the earth or etc. etc. etc.. Wizard Jail doesn't really exist too well because any mechanisms you could use to deny a mage power--enchantments to strip their mind, other spells probably--require another mage to either be maintaining the spell, or make the costly decision to relinquish it either safely or unsafely. And even then, all it takes is a second of faltering for Mages with sympathetic connections to find and break any enchantments, or one lucky moment for the imprisoned mage himself to slip his bonds and escape. There's a reason why Consilium punishments tend to skip from "Censure and Reparation" to "Death."
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 04:54
|
|
|
If you want to hold a powerful wizard you pretty much have to suppress their magic directly with Prime, suppress their ability to decide or attempt to escape with Mind, or keep them totally helpless with temporal stasis or an inescapable coma or something. Mind you, the first or second aren't necessarily super hard to do. Like, if you have a helpless opponent that you can just slit the throat of anyway, and they'll remain helpless for as many hours as a ritual spell cast on their person should take to finish, then that ritual spell could probably be arbitrarily incapacitating. It's kind of like how you can probably inflict any kind of hideous permanent malady on someone with a Master-level spell that they fail to withstand, since one of the straightforward effects accessible to 5-dot Arcana is "target instantly dies". Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Mar 28, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 05:37
|
|
|
The Beast-centered supplement for Mortal Remains comes out on Wednesday. Adding "Cheiron drones hunting oppressed otherkin to make super viagra" to my tabletop bucket list.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 05:42
|
|
|
Basic Chunnel posted:The Beast-centered supplement for Mortal Remains comes out on Wednesday. Adding "Cheiron drones hunting oppressed otherkin to make super viagra" to my tabletop bucket list. Please tell me this isn't actually in it. Please.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 05:46
|
|
|
The Unlife Aquatic posted:Please tell me this isn't actually in it. Please. isn't that a thing from a previous beast book already
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 05:49
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 2, 2024 18:01 |
|
|
Cease to Hope posted:isn't that a thing from a previous beast book already Why would you read any beast books unless you were posting snide comments about them on the internet.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 05:54
|
|