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S.J. posted:You have no idea how excited I am about this. I can use my Infinity minis for it... That's what I've been using mine for, they look great and hard to find any that don't fit the setting.
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 05:57 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 14:49 |
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ZearothK posted:Lure. Of. Heroic. Fascism. In. Werewolf. Not that I would use WOD for this, but "Neo-Nazi Werewolves" sound like a perfect mook to be gunned down in a Weird War 2 campaign. Blaskowicz: The Shootening
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 06:16 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:Not that I would use WOD for this, but "Neo-Nazi Werewolves" sound like a perfect mook to be gunned down in a Weird War 2 campaign. Castle Wolfenstein indeed. Who is the guy you guys are referring to as Swedish Dracula?
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 07:22 |
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Helical Nightmares posted:Who is the guy you guys are referring to as Swedish Dracula? Martin Ericsson, the Lead Story-thinker of the revenant White Wolf. EDIT: This image you see all over the new WoD stuff is him. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Jun 29, 2017 |
# ? Jun 29, 2017 07:54 |
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I showed that picture to my brother. He said he thought that picture was a version of Dr. Claw from a gritty reboot of Inspector Gadget.
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 12:13 |
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He has the audacity to demand that a photo of himself be used as loving Dracula in the vampire game. Nothing else he does to reshape the oWoD games to fit an image he developed in 1992 should shock anyone
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 12:27 |
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:I really can't wait to see Werewolf after the comments by Swede Dracula on them being Neo-Nazis. With Vampire, he just talked about how dark the game should be and how he wants to go back to the old days. With Werewolf he's leading with them being Neo-Nazis and the depths they'll sink to are now endless. He's, weirdly, not wrong. Werewolf in both iterations emphasized racial identity, nostalgia, and might makes right. They both seem to have a slightly different take on blood and soil if looked at in just the right way. Heck, many of the facists were environmentalists of a racist sort.
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 12:55 |
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Nuns with Guns posted:He has the audacity to demand that a photo of himself be used as loving Dracula in the vampire game. Nothing else he does to reshape the oWoD games to fit an image he developed in 1992 should shock anyone The timeline's a little wrong there - he was picked as dracula for the 20th edition of vampire years before Paradox bought White Wolf. If I remember right they got prominent larpers to pose in costume for the clan photos, and he was picked for the Tzimisce photo. It's more that he's a big-name larper in Sweden who was able to convince his bosses to buy White Wolf and make vampire his day job.
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 13:24 |
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Can't wait to see how Mage turns out!
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 13:30 |
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Oh, if he's a VtM larper, that explains everything.
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 13:31 |
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BrainParasite posted:He's, weirdly, not wrong. Werewolf in both iterations emphasized racial identity, nostalgia, and might makes right. They both seem to have a slightly different take on blood and soil if looked at in just the right way. Heck, many of the facists were environmentalists of a racist sort. This is true but the original subtext was that these aspects of their society was leading them to ruin. He seems to be leaning on them being heroic and these obsessions as positive by describing it as "heroic fascism". There's nothing wrong with subtext, especially if done well and ultimately having a positive message, but leading with, the Werewolves are all heroic fascists going down in a blaze of glory isn't exactly the original message or intent. It's a character flaw and it's heavily implied that for them to succeed, they have to overcome these flaws. Didn't Swede Drac say in an interview that the Black Furies have decided to let the human race die out until they embrace feminism or was that some other idiot? It's hard to keep the terrible iterations and hot takes on Werewolf separate.
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 14:06 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:Not that I would use WOD for this, but "Neo-Nazi Werewolves" sound like a perfect mook to be gunned down in a Weird War 2 campaign. I'm way into a game where I get to shoot Neo-Nazi werewolves. Where do I sign up? That sounds sick as hell.
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 14:16 |
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:This is true but the original subtext was that these aspects of their society was leading them to ruin. He seems to be leaning on them being heroic and these obsessions as positive by describing it as "heroic fascism".
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 17:20 |
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That Old Tree posted:Martin Ericsson, the Lead Story-thinker of the revenant White Wolf. Bear in mind he uses that piece on his company profile. If for some reason you think that's awfully silly, like I do, here's a picture of what he actually looks like (which is kinda hard to find, most pictures of him are glamour shots in LARP gear). Feels almost petty to bring up, but I find it that silly.
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 17:29 |
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He looks like a poorly disguised cardassian spy.
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 17:31 |
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Evil Mastermind posted:It wasn't even that much of a subtext; the game was always pretty up-front about the idea of how the Garou were supposed to be defending the Earth spirit and everything, but were too busy fighting centuries-old feuds and comparing dick sizes to actually do their loving job. see this sounds less like 'heroic fascists' and more like 'modern leftism'
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 17:32 |
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The Garou also almost killed all the Fera who were probably way better than them at their jobs
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 17:35 |
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Why is he wearing tinsel on his wrist?
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 18:25 |
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Why is he wearing tinsel on his wrist? If you know some other way to look faux-tough in a Werewolf shirt I'd like to hear it.
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 19:21 |
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BrainParasite posted:He's, weirdly, not wrong. Werewolf in both iterations emphasized racial identity, nostalgia, and might makes right. They both seem to have a slightly different take on blood and soil if looked at in just the right way. Heck, many of the facists were environmentalists of a racist sort. RocknRollaAyatollah posted:This is true but the original subtext was that these aspects of their society was leading them to ruin. He seems to be leaning on them being heroic and these obsessions as positive by describing it as "heroic fascism". The perspective presented in the World of Darkness is not all that different from The Matrix: it's the perspective of a middle-class adolescent beginning to question whether their reality is really real. You know that reality cannot be the one presented to you on television, nor do most people experience reality the way you do in an affluent suburb. (Lewis Mumford criticized the entire concept of a suburb as "an asylum for the preservation of illusion...based on a childish view of the world," and for good reason.) You know that when your parents and teachers tell you to be "realistic," it's a particular vision of realism. So what you tend to see in these games is the mindset of someone breaking with the Establishment but with all the prejudices of someone raised in it. All the institutions of Western liberal democracy are presented as irredeemably corrupt. Middle-class suburbia is at best a colourless limbo. Christianity is nihilistic and the Roman Catholic Church in particular is made into a Satanic mockery of itself. At the same time the City, as opposed to the Suburb, is presented as a nightmarish "concrete jungle" haunted by "urban predators." The Eastern world is presented always through the mystery-fogged lens of Orientalism. Non-Abrahamic religion--especially anything that can be conflated with the New Age movement--is "swallowed whole" without critique, to use an outdated Marxist-Leninist term. And of course the stories abound with various subtypes of Magical Negro, Noble Savage, Inscrutable Asian, and most famously, Thieving Gypsies. In the WoD, what isn't bleak and bitter is often characterized by a jejune sort of New Age sentimentality, and it's no coincidence that New Age and fascist sentiment take root in the suburban middle class. You can lead middle-class people into supporting atrocities if you get them worked up enough about the failures of the system and offer them an alternative that contains a promise of pagan jouissance. To paraphrase Eco, neither St. Augustine nor Stonehenge are fascist, but if you create a pseudointellectual syncretism that combines the two, that's the sort of thing around which fascism can coagulate. So when you read a WoD book by someone like Phil Brucato, the author appears to outright endorse some really problematic content, or to merely document it with a chilling lack of comment--as if the Red Talons and Black Furies are real tribes. And then there are authors like Steven Brown, who don't work with metaphor and simply enjoy the superficial tropes of the setting--so in Vampire as he presents it, you're playing monsters from David Icke's insane fantasies and it's awesome. This is another reason I compare the whole exercise to The Matrix--oh, our "heroes" commit mass murder? Never mind, those people weren't really real anyway, just fragments of an all-consuming establishment that must be fought. Transgressing the boundaries is a good in itself, more important than a basic sense of ethics. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Jun 29, 2017 |
# ? Jun 29, 2017 21:10 |
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Unrelated to games, but Tacumi Taco is pretty legit. Curry Beef in a taco shell made out of a fried gyoza shell with three bean rice and a salad is pretty legit. Mainly the taco part. They mixed like Japanese and Mexican and it's really good.
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# ? Jun 29, 2017 23:20 |
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Flavivirus posted:The timeline's a little wrong there - he was picked as dracula for the 20th edition of vampire years before Paradox bought White Wolf. If I remember right they got prominent larpers to pose in costume for the clan photos, and he was picked for the Tzimisce photo. It's more that he's a big-name larper in Sweden who was able to convince his bosses to buy White Wolf and make vampire his day job. Haha wow that makes it even better
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 00:10 |
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Splicer posted:He looks like a poorly disguised cardassian spy. He looks like a Lutheran youth minister.
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 02:24 |
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What the gently caress is even "a famous LARPer"
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 02:47 |
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a full-time cosplayer minus the self respect
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 06:21 |
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Halloween Jack posted:Indeed, Himmer, Darre, Backe, and a number of infamous SS figures were agronomists who believed in that quasi-mystical "blood and soil" racial pseudoscience. Thanks. A lot of oWoD stuff bugged me since I was a teen and I didn't have the toolbox to put the "why" into words.
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 06:28 |
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Mage especially had a lot of the Matrix on its sleeve even though it was supposed to be about people who could do actual magic. Of course. you did magic by 'seeing through the lie' and 'imposing your will on reality' and in the first edition the Technocracy (your main antagonist) were literally soulless agents of Paradox (the force that prevented you from performing the really big magics). Even in later editions the Technocrats had a lot of black suits and mirror shades going on.
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 09:12 |
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Kwyndig posted:Mage especially had a lot of the Matrix on its sleeve even though it was supposed to be about people who could do actual magic. Of course. you did magic by 'seeing through the lie' and 'imposing your will on reality' and in the first edition the Technocracy (your main antagonist) were literally soulless agents of Paradox (the force that prevented you from performing the really big magics). Even in later editions the Technocrats had a lot of black suits and mirror shades going on. I mean so we're clear Mage: the Ascension predates The Matrix by six years, the first edition that post-dated the movie was Revised. It's perhaps a bit more apt to say that Mage and The Matrix were both borrowing from a lot of the same sources, namely Gnosticism 101 and an abiding love for trenchcoats.
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 09:18 |
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Huh, well I can never keep that sort of stuff straight in my head. I thought they were closer together. Weird how they're so similar then.
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 09:23 |
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This seems as good a place as any to post this. I somewhat recently had an opportunity to talk about my experience playing We Need To Talk, a hybrid RPG / interactive theater performance piece about ending relationships made by a friend of mine. It's well worth checking out, and there's video of my performance here.
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 15:21 |
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Kai Tave posted:I mean so we're clear Mage: the Ascension predates The Matrix by six years, the first edition that post-dated the movie was Revised. It's perhaps a bit more apt to say that Mage and The Matrix were both borrowing from a lot of the same sources, namely Gnosticism 101 and an abiding love for trenchcoats. And he has a sword and a trenchcoat. It's very videogamey, the way he walks around looking like he does and no one bats an eye--even when he fires a submachine gun in public, there's just a brief commotion like he triggered the ! Visibly Armed in a stealth action game.
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 15:31 |
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Hey, so, I've been in a weird mood and have been brainstorming a weird fantasy setting with my friends based simply on a couple of disparate ideas from other RPGs that I think would work well together. Firstly, while listening to System Mastery's episode on Xcrawl yesterday I noticed something I'd completely missed on my first listen; copyrighted spells. I don't know if the setting ever went into that much detail on them, but the idea of casting a spell with a spell component of $100 in royalties to the Wizard who originally created the spell is sweet as heck and opens up so many different ideas: fake bootleg spells with which you obviously don't have to pay the royalty but that are of a shoddier make; Creative Commons spells; spells that have fallen into public domain because the patent has expired; liches and other undead Wizards losing the patents to their spells because they've been declared legally dead (and obviously they are lobbying for a change in copyright law because of this); and nerd Wizard communities making spells as a community and getting into constant online Wizard wars over which branch of the spell is the best one. The second one was an idea from Secret of Zir'an, a tragically flawed fantasy RPG with some interesting ideas in there; the idea of magical money, where if you click two coins of a smaller denomination together they combine into a single coin of a larger, appropriate denomination. Also generally the idea of industrialized magic. Other ideas I want to liberally steal are Warforged from Eberron because Warforged own and Defilers from Dark Sun so there's a conflict between Big Arcana literally sucking the life out of the planet and environmentalist Druids, Rangers and Elves. Obvious pitfalls of a modern fantasy setting I want to avoid are the "species X are literally ethnic group Y from the real world" like Shadowrun did with its orks as African-Americans 'cause lol nope and simply making the world our world but with magic. There are going to be analogous elements though: like, for an example, the America equivalent is going to be the first Republic in a sea of monarchies founded on the principle of freedom of religion. Incidentally, this means that the America equivalent also has the largest concentration of evil cults dedicated to nihilism and destruction (but enough about Republicans) because they were remorselessly persecuted back in their original countries, so you might have a friendly neighborhood death cult organizing a bake sale. I mean if anyone has any ideas that would work with this dumb mess I'd appreciate it.
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 17:35 |
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Monarchies in settings where Divine Right is provable and tangible always seem like an interesting idea to explore that rarely gets said exploration. Also something dumb that I thought about : A few spells in systems with components require a diamond of [X] value as a component. I posit that this is because of the thermal conductivity of diamond, with the value being directly related to it's purity. So in a world with industrial-grade diamons, which are much cheaper and more effective than natural diamonds when it comes to thermal conductivity, how would this change? What kind of industry would weird spell components create anyways? Are there bat or spider farms? synthetic newts eyes for the socially concious warlock? ANYHOW, that's something I'd consider.
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 17:54 |
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Or it's not based on a physical property of the gem itself, but the metaphysical worth people ascribe to it based on its market value. The diamond industry was created to artificially inflate their value in order to both make money and allow smaller, less impressive diamonds to work as spell components.
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 17:58 |
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Moriatti posted:Monarchies in settings where Divine Right is provable and tangible always seem like an interesting idea to explore that rarely gets said exploration. This is actually a great idea. I hadn't decided whether I want Divine magic to come from actually provable and tangible gods or go the Eberron way of "Well the gods might exist, belief in them certainly grants spells, but so do other philosophies so I don't know" but this might make me skew towards provable and tangible divinities. Also, yeah, the market value of diamonds is definitely going to be something to consider in this setting, thanks to both of you for bringing that up. e: Just came up with the twist needed for the divine right thing: the gods verifiably exist but they are too aloof to concern themselves with mortal matters. However, centuries ago they did run around for awhile and spawn some demigods who went on to found nation states where they rule as monarchs by divine right. Their descendants still rule even though they only have a drop of divine blood in them, but their divine ancestors haven't really bothered to check up on them for a while so things might have gone south. Ratpick fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Jun 30, 2017 |
# ? Jun 30, 2017 18:02 |
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Kwyndig posted:Huh, well I can never keep that sort of stuff straight in my head. I thought they were closer together. Weird how they're so similar then. The whole "blank faced g-men in nondescript suits, sunglasses, and earpieces" thing was a pretty prevalent part of the 90's zeitgeist stemming from the actual men in black conspiracy theories and filtered into the pop culture at the time. You saw it in the X-Files, the actual Men in Black Movie, the first Deus Ex, other RPGs like Conspiracy X, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I'm missing. The Technocracy employing similar men in black as faceless sinister antagonist agents of The Man is perfectly in keeping with that sort of thing since in many ways Mage is a conspiracy game among other things, it's just the conspiracy involves magic instead of aliens. The whole world is a lie thing is, like I said, just very basic Gnosticism 101 stuff that the Wachowskis were also drawing on, and the trenchcoats were everywhere at the time.
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 18:19 |
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Ratpick posted:there's a conflict between Big Arcana literally sucking the life out of the planet and environmentalist Druids, Rangers and Elves. Drill for mako energy.
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 18:26 |
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Ratpick posted:This is actually a great idea. I hadn't decided whether I want Divine magic to come from actually provable and tangible gods or go the Eberron way of "Well the gods might exist, belief in them certainly grants spells, but so do other philosophies so I don't know" but this might make me skew towards provable and tangible divinities. So you can go a couple of ways. Divine lineage and demigod rulers working on constantly diluting blood is an interesting way to take it. Why are the gods no longer aroun in this case? Did they get bored? Did something happen to limit their ability to affect the world? Did the demigods decided they were too much trouble and lead a band of their people to slay them? You also could have some fun with a nation that cloned their founding emperor and now have a man with no will, but great divine power sit on a throne of strings, with many chancellors and viziers all fighting to grab even one. And/or you could have just one or two nations favoured by a particularly aggressive god in a brutal theocracy. What does disobedience to scripture do when the deity who shaped that scripture is around to cast punishment on you? If you're doing a polytheistic (and I presume you are) pantheon, you can even have other gods frown on ones who directly interfere with mortals, or pacts and treaties that are binding not only legally, but by the very patchwork of reality. It's pretty fertile ground to work with.
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 18:33 |
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One of the few decent bits of material posted to the D&D fan wiki was the Patronage setting for 4e, that explored the idea that the land needs a king and there is magic in authority - without a king and associated vassal system, the land simply can't be worked. Weeds choke out your crops, rocks break your plows, you get nothing from hunting or fishing, wolves eat your herds, all kinds of things. There are many different societies and ways this gets expressed, which I thought was really creative.
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# ? Jun 30, 2017 22:35 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 14:49 |
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Ratpick posted:Incidentally, this means that the America equivalent also has the largest concentration of evil cults dedicated to nihilism and destruction (but enough about Republicans) because they were remorselessly persecuted back in their original countries, so you might have a friendly neighborhood death cult organizing a bake sale. I like this idea. Along those lines, when I was trying to come up with a setting like that myself, the main thing was that the next step of corporate personhood was corporate apotheosis. A board of directors is not a god, but the law grants them the powers of one, the domains of which are a matter of branding, their divine strength waning and waxing with the value of their stock.
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# ? Jul 1, 2017 03:05 |